About Piperka

What is Piperka?

It works as a plain old web comic list and there's a top list built from user subscriptions too. But those things are not the site's main focus.

It also helps you keep track of comics. It tells you what comics have updated since your last visit and keeps bookmarks for you. You can input it an archive page's address and Piperka will match it with a comic and a page. Piperka runs a crawler which periodically checks on webcomics to seek for new pages and adds them to its index if it finds any.

What kinds of comics does Piperka keep track of?

Generally anything that has a linear archive with navigation buttons with distinct, permanent addresses for archive pages. Piperka's crawler acts much like a human who returns to visit the last page to see if the page's changed to add a link to an update.

Does Piperka do hotlinking?

No.

The usual form of function for Piperka is to offer redirect links which update the user's bookmark and take the user's browser to the comic's own archive.

I don't want to be listed on Piperka!

Are you sure? Piperka doesn't copy any of the webcomic's contents (save for the URLs of their archives). I would expect that having your comic listed on Piperka would only bring you more readers.

That said, just send me a message if you don't want to be listed in here and I'll remove your comic. We don't keep anyone here against their will.

What do you do with users' email addresses?

Password recovery. Piperka can also, if requested, send you an email when a comic has been added. I won't give them to anyone else.

How often does the site update?

The update job is ran hourly, though only a portion of the comics are checked on each run. It tries to act intelligently and be efficient yet timely. With varying success.

The update job may be thwarted by badly timed net outages and the comic sites may change their archive structure. The scripts are not infallible. Normally an update to a comic should show within a day at Piperka, but if they seem to be absent for longer than that let us know and we'll investigate. I've written a blog post that covers more detail about what the crawler does.

Can I use RSS?

All the comics are provided with an RSS feed as well. Though a word of warning, they're pretty bare bones and if the comic has its own RSS you're most likely better off by using it. The latest entry on them has a time stamp from the last successful crawl which may or may not match with their actual publishing time. Please don't send me corrections if they don't match. As with everything else, the service is provided as is with not guarantees.

If you're a comic author and your own publishing platform doesn't provide one, you're welcome to link to Piperka's feed. Giving credit would be appreciated if you do. If you just want to keep an eye on how well Piperka catches your updates without actively using Piperka then this could be the option for you.

Or if you're just on the fence about whether to create an account or not, you can start with just this and come back later to get one if you like. It comes with recommendations and other features.

Is there an app?

Why, yes.

Get it on Google Play

Google Play and the Google Play logo are trademarks of Google LLC.

What does Piperka run on?

Debian GNU/Linux, on a VPS at UpCloud. The pages are served by Snap with pages generated by Heist library. The database is PostgreSQL and the crawler's written in Haskell with parsing done with Perl. Most of the software stack is free software and available at Gitlab.

How do I contact you?

My email is at the bottom of the page. Piperka can be found on Discord and IRC is an option, you can find me on #piperka on OFTC. If you have bug reports or development ideas, then Gitlab tickets would be the place. The preferred way of telling me about comic specific issues is via the on site ticket system, which can be accessed on the per comic info page.

Piperka? Paprika? Pepper?

When I started working on this site, I just called it "subscribe". I had a quick look at the respective domain name, subscribe.com and saw that there was no such server yet. Later on I had a closer look and found out that the name was actually reserved, by yet another domain hoarder, just not one that had set up a "this domain is for sale" web page for it. Hence I was sent to look for names elsewhere. And I looked. And I looked.

Finally, I was looking for various terms around paprikas and finally found one of them free. "Piperka" is pepper in Bulgarian, even though I have no personal connection to the country.

I had had a friend take an image of those paprikas long before I thought of a name for the site. The yellow one was cut into slices and eaten with bread and cheese, the rest went into a pizza.