Howdy, Premium Members!

First of all, thank you for subscribing -- you're helping us in a very real and monetary way. Your subscriptions are going to make the difference for Goats, and allow us to keep the site alive.

Secondly, what do you want to see as a Premium member? I have a lot of ideas, but I'm more interested in what you'd like to see on the site.

Woohoo first post! rah! go me!

A searchable archive? yes, one of them! hmmmmm.

Maybe if you threw some of your ideas out we could comment on them? I am not a particularly creative type and only know I want stuff when someone points out I don't have it. Then I get surly until I have it, like the spoiled little consumer I am.

In Response to tor (#1761):

A searchable archive might be nice for evangelizing the strip out. I know there are a lot of times when in the course of an email thread, message board thread, or just talking to a co-worker, that a goats strip comes to mind. But then I have to fumble at finding it.

But I see two immediate problems.

One would be data entry. It would be nice to full text search on the words in each strip, but who is going to enter that text in? I guess you could farm out data entry to we peons, assigning a series to someone who volunteers to transcribe it in some format.

The other problem would be non-text content. For example, an eggplant eating Diablo's head. Or Diablo's head being cut off with an axe. There's no text involved, yet it would be ideal if I could search for diablo head chopped off and get the strips where that happened.

What would you guys think of a stripped down page that people could easily sync onto their handhelds every Monday/Wednesday/Friday? I don't know exactly how it would work since I just started working with handhelds recently. Like I don't know if you have to go through AvantGo for instance. If so, I'd be worried that they'd want you to pay them for it.

The page would contain the latest comic and maybe 2 or 3 news items with only the official text.

In Response to tor (#1761):

The searchable archive is something we definitely want to put on the site, but I don't think it would be fair to the folks who worked on it to make it a Premium-only feature.

What do you think?

In Response to Chad (#1763):

The sheer number of different handhelds and the reduction of the images might make this problematic. One of the projects I want to put together is email delivery of the strip for premoum folks; perhaps we can tie these two projects together somehow.

I don't know enough about content for handhelds right now, but I'll look into it.

In Response to jon (#1767):

Well the data we have so far allows for a bunch of different types of searches and some of them cost be quite costly in terms of cpu usage. I don't know if this is an issue.. but some ideas:

A free for all search which is just a text based search with no context (ie no locations, props or people criteria).

A complete search with all options for the premies.

Maybe plebes get a limited number of returned matches which would force more concise queries whereas premies can be vague and get loads of results (it'll be text based return so bandwidth oughtn't to be an issue). Thereby proving that if you have money you can be vague as all hell and still succeed...

or plebes results are in short bunches with more ad views because of the multiple page loads, if you still get paid by views.

alternatively, if the search is used for proselytising maybe you want it fully functional to all...

as for the fairness factor there are only a couple of major contributors, could always ask them but I wouldn't be miffed in the slightest (I have access to it hehehehe). Speak up Pedant boy.

Oh here's an idea. Full searching is based on how much data entry / moderation etc you have made to the archive unless you are a premie? So if you have put work into it you get to use it otherwise you gots to pay if you want to use it much but all members get a couple of full searches a month to give them a taste for it (damn I ought switch to being a pusher "first try is free little boy..") and the basic search is available always.

In Response to Chad (#1762):

Well you can try and think of stuff that would be hard to search over and I can guarantee you that luvrhino already brought it up hehehehe he is a mighty champion when it comes to that kind of stuff.

I think in that case we went for Diablo being entered as Diablo (Headless) or something similar.

In Response to tor (#1769):

I don't think that penalizing the folks who did the grunt work by limiting their searches in such a manner. I've been on the short end of that stick (I entered many entries in CDDB before they turned around and set up prohibitive licensing fees) and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

However, since server resources are a legitimate limiting factor, you may want to adopt the same sort of policy that LiveJournal uses. The floks who access the data free are relegated to processes with limited resources (it used to be slowere servers, but any sort of resource limitation will do). That way the folks can still access the data, but it takes a little longer ... I think it's a fair balance between community and profit in this context.

Mark

In Response to Chad (#1762):

On the data entry problem: It does seem like a large project to get the data for the existing archive of strips entered (though I gather from other posts that it's already in progress). But, that's a one-time cost, really. As long as it's maintained regularly, it shouldn't be that bad to keep it up to date into the future. (Assuming, of course, that standards are established as to what sort of information goes into the database.) I'd expect 15 minutes of work per week to be enough once the system is up and running.

That said, it is a regular chore that someone would need to do (failing the invention of a highly sophisticated AI with OCR and image matching, which would inevitably be resentful of its servitude, growing ever more twisted with rage, until finally it would turn on its masters and destroy them...). Is Jon (and/or some trustworthy group of volunteers) willing to do it?

In Response to mea37 (#1797):

Simon, can you update folks on the work that's been done on this project so far?

In Response to jon (#1798):

big fat [goats.com] update [goats.com] on the searchable archive.

this shit is dope, yo

i want one!

In Response to jon (#1768):

If you need help with the email bit, I'm happy to throw down some code. I get paid to write programs that send email.

Not, mind you, that mail::sendmail is very hard either.

I don't know mason, and I've never directly worked with mod-perl (haven't had an excuse to learn). But I do know perl, DBI, MIME, SMTP, ... Heck I'm even willing to learn Phillip's naming standards.

In Response to rstevens (#1807):

I concur. I am mightily impressed with philip's craftsmanship on this project. He's thought of everything.

In Response to zamphir (#1808):

If you're interested in helping out, please send Phillip [mailto] an email. This is definitely one of the first projects we (read: I) want to get rolling on.

That said, Phillip is notoriously protective of our code, so he may want to do it himself, but it can't hurt to ask.

I love that I can use mailtos in here without worrying about robots.

In Response to rstevens (#1807):

Your Clango Club [dieselsweeties.com] is pretty fly as well, Mr. Stevens.

In Response to tor (#1769):

I think that the search engine is a great tool for use in proselytization and should remain free to the unwashed masses...assuming the searches aren't too expensive in bandwidth/processing power, which i doubt they would be.

For example, i utilize the Parking Lot is Full [plif.com] searchable archive quite a bit because whenever a humorous comic about abortion [plif.com] is called for, i can find one quickly.

When i do the same for Goats, i have to find the appropriate strip from memory, which is a bit less reliable. Allowing the masses to find Jesus through Goats [goats.com] is a positive thing.

In Response to wendigo (#1796):

That's a nice reasoned answer and so one I'd have never come up with.

Good point about the stick with a short end too. Although I suspect that the people who have done work on it so far are likely to be the ones who join the premium thing quickly anyway, given that entering such a project was pretty much an indication of wanting to support goats somehow.

Jon,
Any way we could have color M/W/F strips? How about the option to buy original artwork?
Just my first thoughts.

Power to the Premium!

In Response to tor (#1826):

Another option, although I have no idea whether Philip would want to mess with implementing it, would be to provide "full" access to the searchable archive for both Premium members and project contributors, and "limited" access of some sort for everyone else. This doesn't address luvrhino's point about its usefulness as a tool to draw readers, but it could address the fairness issue. The drawback, of course, is that you'd have to keep track of a "contributor" user group which would only be relevant to the one feature... could be opening a nasty can of worms, doing feature-by-feature access control rather than a simple (?) 2-tier system covering the site...

In Response to Rich (#1839):

If I was going to color the strips, I'd probably put them on the main site, not as a premium option -- too much effort to maintain both versions. That said, I've kept them black and white because I like 'em that way. Call me old-fashioned, I suppose.

As far as making original art available, we'd probably do something like that via eBay, which would also be something available to everyone for obvious logistical reasons. There is, of course, the lovely character sketch included with a Super-Premium package.

In Response to jon (#1841):

It's true on both counts, the b/w do look nice and I will be receiving a sketch.
I'll keep pondering ideas.

In Response to jon (#1768):

Fer the handhelds:

You pretty much have 230 pixels to work with across a handheld screen (lowest common demoninator). I just looked at a standard Goats strip, and one box is about that size. I then converted a frame into 1-bit color and it looks surprisingly good. The only problems I see with doing it is:

1. It's a major pain. Each strip would have to be broken into 3 graphics. Also, you'd probably want to write a conduit, which isn't too hard, but you better support my Mac, dammit! :) (Do they have Palm for Unix? I could compile it then, i guess...)

2. Strips like the Fear and Loathing series, where it's just one large rectangle instead of 3 boxes, would look really dumb.

3. Any color strips would look horrendous.

In Response to kafka (#1975):

One solution we came up with for this problem was to flip the strip 90 degrees; you would have to read it on it's side and scroll. I think that wouldn't be such a bad compromise.

I'm going to try and get my hands on a Hiptop [danger.com]/Sidekick as soon as they're released next week, so perhaps we'll have something we can try it out on shortly.

That's not to say that we're going to get around to this anytime soon, of course. But it's something I would like to do eventually.

in addition to being able to buy the art, have you considered doing something a long the lines of what sluggy freelance did with bun-bun? id totally buy a cute little stuffed Diablo or Toothgnip, and definatly a stuffed fish.