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Kurtz pisses off his forum when he shuts it down (not a bitch thread)
amateurhour
One day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered User regular
One day I'll be professionalhourThe woods somewhere in TennesseeRegistered User regular
First off, this isn't meant as the beginning of a troll post or flame war vs pVp. If there isn't enough content in this op to warrant the thread, you can lock it, I won't be heartbroken.
The news:
So Scott Kurtz teams up with Kris Straub, Dave Kellet, and Brad Guigar to show the world how to make webcomics. They use straub's forums over at halfpixel.com because he's already got one in place with tons of server room. All is well
Skip to a couple years later, and the forums, which are 90% pvp related, are costing the server host too much in CPU power and bandwidth so they tell Straub to shut them down...or else.
Kurtz hates the forums. He hates the fact that there are two threads devoted to pVp and five hundred about last weeks heroes, bitching, and motivational posters. He hates what they've become, and they're basically a low res carbon copy of the PA forums. Not that it was his intention, it's just what happens when you have that many fans and give them a forum.
So kurtz tells straub to not rehost the pvp forums, and starts a facebook group and says that if you want to be part of the pvp community you can listen to the podcast, join him on twitter, and the facebook group.
CUE a couple hundred hardcore posters who want his head on a stick because he "took away their home" without warning. They already tried to make a home on his new webcomics.com site, which is beautiful, by the way, and several of them have made sister forums elsewhere.
Here's where the debate lies....
Kurtz's position seems to be that he can do whatever the hell he wants with his community, the forums had devolved into trash, were hurting his friends business, and they need to get over it. I'm paraphrasing that, obviously.
On one hand, He's right. These fans make up less than 5% of his audience, much like the hardcore posters here. If gabe and tycho destroyed the forums tomorrow their business wouldn't go anywhere, and neither will his. He will get on just fine. He brought a lot of the hate on himself because of his "bad boy of webcomics" attitude he tends to play up whenever something like this happens. It's that "take my ball and go home" mentality.
He obviously cares though, because he's made an apology so far, and showed up on several of the newly spawned forums.
On the other hand, the people are right. They're the ones who buy his shit, and he is running a business, weather he wants to admit it or not. If dell decided tomorrow to stop including a piece of software that only 5% of their customers used, they'd still need to give a warning to avoid the backlash.
So my question is this... Who's right?
Also, what obligations does someone in the webcomic industry owe to his or her fans when their site hits this kind of level. When you've got a forum with over five thousand people on it, what do you REALLY owe them at the end of the day? Just because your comic is free, does that give you the right to treat your fans like they don't matter?
Note: I am unbiased in this. I see both sides have a pretty good set of points, and a lot of bad ones. The difference is that the good points and bad points from the readers are spread out across hundreds of fans, each with different personalities, while the good and bad points from Kurtz are 100% kurtz.
So D&D, what's your take on this. Will Kurtz become the new Buckley, and have plenty of fans and money, but still be hated in the eyes of his peers, or will he find a way to overcome this?
edit: I know this was horribly typed, but it's late, and I'm tired, and most of you are smarter than I am anyway, so you'll make it look better. : )
The news:
So Scott Kurtz teams up with Kris Straub, Dave Kellet, and Brad Guigar to show the world how to make webcomics. They use straub's forums over at halfpixel.com because he's already got one in place with tons of server room. All is well
Skip to a couple years later, and the forums, which are 90% pvp related, are costing the server host too much in CPU power and bandwidth so they tell Straub to shut them down...or else.
Kurtz hates the forums. He hates the fact that there are two threads devoted to pVp and five hundred about last weeks heroes, bitching, and motivational posters. He hates what they've become, and they're basically a low res carbon copy of the PA forums. Not that it was his intention, it's just what happens when you have that many fans and give them a forum.
So kurtz tells straub to not rehost the pvp forums, and starts a facebook group and says that if you want to be part of the pvp community you can listen to the podcast, join him on twitter, and the facebook group.
CUE a couple hundred hardcore posters who want his head on a stick because he "took away their home" without warning. They already tried to make a home on his new webcomics.com site, which is beautiful, by the way, and several of them have made sister forums elsewhere.
Here's where the debate lies....
Kurtz's position seems to be that he can do whatever the hell he wants with his community, the forums had devolved into trash, were hurting his friends business, and they need to get over it. I'm paraphrasing that, obviously.
On one hand, He's right. These fans make up less than 5% of his audience, much like the hardcore posters here. If gabe and tycho destroyed the forums tomorrow their business wouldn't go anywhere, and neither will his. He will get on just fine. He brought a lot of the hate on himself because of his "bad boy of webcomics" attitude he tends to play up whenever something like this happens. It's that "take my ball and go home" mentality.
He obviously cares though, because he's made an apology so far, and showed up on several of the newly spawned forums.
On the other hand, the people are right. They're the ones who buy his shit, and he is running a business, weather he wants to admit it or not. If dell decided tomorrow to stop including a piece of software that only 5% of their customers used, they'd still need to give a warning to avoid the backlash.
So my question is this... Who's right?
Also, what obligations does someone in the webcomic industry owe to his or her fans when their site hits this kind of level. When you've got a forum with over five thousand people on it, what do you REALLY owe them at the end of the day? Just because your comic is free, does that give you the right to treat your fans like they don't matter?
Note: I am unbiased in this. I see both sides have a pretty good set of points, and a lot of bad ones. The difference is that the good points and bad points from the readers are spread out across hundreds of fans, each with different personalities, while the good and bad points from Kurtz are 100% kurtz.
So D&D, what's your take on this. Will Kurtz become the new Buckley, and have plenty of fans and money, but still be hated in the eyes of his peers, or will he find a way to overcome this?
edit: I know this was horribly typed, but it's late, and I'm tired, and most of you are smarter than I am anyway, so you'll make it look better. : )
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However, Kurtz is a douche.
How much does it cost to host these forums anyway?
This is basically my reaction to him in general. I accept he has no obligation to support these forums but it's just a douche thing to do.
Smart move? Probably not, since hits are hits, but lets be honest, even if the forum community is 5% of his viewership, only a small fraction of that community is actually going to stop reading his comic, so we're talking a fraction of a fraction that'll actually quit.
It's like the people on the WoW forums who threaten to quit over things. They never actually do.
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If the PA forums went away, I'd be disappointed, but I'd tell anyone who cried about 'losing their home,' 'seriously, man up and get a grip.' Really, these forums are almost completely tangential to the PA strip. No one of the PA staff regularly posts here, and aside from the forum skin, there's very little that directly ties it into the PA strip. Currently, it's a well run, effectively moderated posting board, but if things were to ever change so that it became an active drag to PA or anything else, it'd be pretty myopic to paint Gabe and Tycho as any sort of villains for giving it the ax. I haven't read the bylaws for webcomic pages in a long time, but I'm pretty sure there's nothing in there that says you owe your readership a forum, especially one that becomes a net negative.
They've shut down the forum before.
Well, the PA Forums is a somewhat dodgy example. I'm pretty sure that Gabe and Tycho own the servers that hold these forums, whereas in the PVP example the servers were part of another service and were dragging down the rest of that site's forums.
Kurtz IS in the right. He doesn't like what the forums became and felt they were doing more harm than good (as someone who posted there I tend to agree, it was getting out of hand.)
I think he could've taken a slightly different tact and explained more what was happening to the forum denizens, as well as given them an alternative or a place to go in the interim while they move to somewhere else. But that doesn't mean he didn't have the right to do what he did.
This isn't like CAD where he deletes threads, forums, people, Guilds, and such because he's bored or they disagree with him or something. There was a legitimate reason for what he did, even if he did it in a somewhat douchetastic manner.
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I know that the forumites may only represent a small amount of the PA readership, but I think that the people who post here regularly buy merch, the PA game, and donate to Child's Play more than most who just browses the comic. (On average)
If I had to guess from my past experience administrating a forum of similar size and readership, I'd say the answer is probably a four-digit number monthly.
It's not just money that's an issue. There's a reason that the "n-word" rule is so rigidly enforced.
::eats cock::
Because we're dicks?
Because the mods hate rap?
Holy fucking shit.
Sorry, anyway, yeah I think this is one of those things that he's perfectly in the right to do, but it could very well come back to bite him. In other words, it's fine to run up the score of an NFL game, but you look like a dick doing so.
I mean, some warning would have been nice, but I've been to the PvP forums and I can see why he wanted them shut down
I've had more intelligent discourse with a scallop
A dead scallop
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
You see he has no Tycho to his Gabe.
Also I used to hang out on those forums, there are some regulars there who would be banned here. And that was years ago.
You don't?
PSN ID : DetectiveOlivaw | TWITTER | STEAM ID | NEVER FORGET
Absolutely nothing. The web comics i read, penny-arcade included, put out a quality product that entertains me. As long as they continue to put out said quality product I will continue to return. I may purchase their merchandise if something catches my fancy. I might give their ads a look if something catches my eye, or learn more about a game or product they mention if I think it is something I enjoy. The provide me entertainment for free. If at any point they feel a product, forum, website, whatever is not something they want to engage in they can just shut it down.
A successful web comic author fosters his community by continuing to produce the web comic. If a forum is, in their eyes, unsuccessful they have every right to kill an "official" forum. Unofficial forums can do whatever they damn well please. If its costing to much money, or ceasing to foster the kind of community the artist wants, put it out of its misery. Let the fans find somewhere else to discuss the comic as well as the other crap that is 99% of the forum contents.
I tried to get back into it but didn't Kris leave? go back to LA or something? I seem to remember him phoning it in a few times.
That said, on the podcasts there are times when Scott's attitude shows through a little, he attempts to be self deprecating but the reality is he appears to have a huge ego and have nothing but contempt for many people (who he claims are jelous of his success). The forums did get a mention on one of those podcasts, just after they moved he was saying the forum was full of, as he put it "faux concern, de-facto business managers" telling them to get to work etc...
Seems he never liked a large proportion of his own community.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
I mean, even if he wasn't that big, he'd still look like he has a terminal disease.
But really that has nothing to do with the thread.
Webcomic artists are human, and sometimes overreact like everyone does. And some are just Tim Buckley level jackasses.
Tell that to the host threatening to pull the plug on Kris Straub's websites.
The threads are backed up, and there appear to be plans to bring the forum back after the holidays.
But no, it turns out Steve Kuntz is a fatty who ate his own fans because he hates them, or something...
I've always assumed it was at least minimally profitable from advertizing.
inorite?
Que the "X is serious business" joke.
While I'm sure there were people that enjoyed the PvP forums, I never found much substance from folks there. I'm probably biased from my experience here, though.
All that aside, it sounds like people are taking it way too seriously. It's just a web page.
I don't... see any ads here? o_O I don't have AdBlock installed or anything...
Either way, it's virtually impossible for forums to make any meaningful amount of money from advertising, let alone make a profit. The ratio of page views (up to hundreds per member per day) to clicks is the lowest on the internet. You generally expect about one ad click per 400 impressions (depending heavily on your market), and with most large forums I've seen numbers for, it's more like one click per 12,000 impressions.
I'd be interested in hearing Khoo's take on all this, as I expect he has some hard figures (and I suspect he searches the forum for his username on a near-daily basis.
A significant amount. Anyone who posts here regularly should probably be buying the odd t shirt because Gabe and Tycho keep this place open literally out of the goodness of their hearts and it generates literally not a dime of revenue. I don't want to go into details of costs because it's tacky but the forum's annual costs are well into five figures.
Regarding Scott Kurtz, he's got every right to shut his forum down. A lot of people tend to think they're owed something that they really aren't, and that sense of entitlement irritates me hugely. For instance, we shut down the G&T chat thread about two years ago, and the vocal minority that posted there bitched up a storm as though they had a right to that thread and as in this case, the term "home" was used. It's bullshit. Scott Kurtz, and indeed Gabe and Tycho, might be advised to keep their forum communities alive because having a place for the fanbase to gather and chat is good for the comic, but that's debateable. How many of you guys have bought t shirts, comic prints, the game (ok so everyone bought the game) etc? It's not clear how said fans actually contribute to the revenue of the site. If Gabe and Tycho (who I should point out once again, give us these forums purely because they know we like them and to no fiscal benefit) asked me to justify the existence of the forums from a fiscal point of view, I couldn't do it.
Scott Kurtz is an actual human being who is close friends with the owners of this forum and comments like that are mean spirited and in very poor taste. He's done nothing to you.
I mean, come on. They have a new comic and web post three times per week. The bulk of their traffic has to be the people who log on to the site three or four times per day on the way into the forum.