Hiatus classifications

My last blog post was about describing comics that are updating. This time around, I'm talking about comics that don't update. Roughly speaking, more than half of the comics listed on Piperka don't see any updates. Thankfully there's much fewer of those that are due to an error on Piperka's end. Comics that have simply disappeared have been retired to the graveyard but there's still a lot left over. Comics that have been finished or abandoned but which are still online. I think both updating and non-updating comics have their place on Piperka but sometimes the trouble is telling them apart. I had already used the internal crawler update score to mark updating comics with a white corner on the listing pages but I'd like to go further with this.

I'm now classifying non-updating comics with a reason for their dormancy. I'm not even trying to make the crawler try to tell apart whether a comic has been completed or abandoned. Instead, it's a moderator action. It'll take a while until all of them have been looked at, of course.

My next plan is to make the comic listings have a bit more information on them besides just the comic name. I'll try out different layouts to see what seems sensible. Update or non-update status and perhaps the page and readers counts. I'll add the option for compact display. One goal with this change is to make it clearer to any new visitors to the site what Piperka is about: Updates and archives rather than just being one giant list of comic titles.

I made an update to the revert page. It's using the same listing code as the other listings now, with pagination and columns. The new listing also shows the time since the redirect was last used. Hopefully it's more usable now. The revert page used to show only the redirects done during the last 24 hours but that clean up got dropped by accident the last time I changed hosts a year and half ago and I decided to leave it as it is now.

Now that I got into touching the listing code again, I implemented another idea I've had for a while. As a shout-out to comic authors, I wouldn't be doing this without you guys. Support Comics is a user specific page which lists those comics they are subscribed to which have a Patreon or Ko-fi pages recorded for them.