Policies
As I can't quite accomplish the impossible, I will have to lay down a few policies on what will be added to Piperka. Or jump below to submit now.
What does Piperka do?
Having a comic listed on Piperka means more than having just the banner and home page URL stored on the server. Piperka will also build an index of all of the archive pages of a comic, and periodically check if more pages have been added to it. As such, I will have to place a number of requirements on anything that I would add to Piperka.
Building the index is done by initially giving the first page of the archives to the crawler and writing an HTML parsing script for seeking for a possible link to the next page. Updates to the archive are sought for by trying to find the next page from the newest known page.
The parser used for this will often have to be custom tailored for a site. There are no widely used standards for these kinds of pages. The first priority of a web designer is to make their pages look good. However, it doesn't have to be done at the cost of navigatibility for scripts too.
A request to comic authors
This doesn't really apply to you if your comic is hosted on a major host like Comicgenesis or Webtoons. They've got their quirks, but the effort to take them into account has already been taken. Not that I would mind if their administrators would apply the following advice.
I'm not necessarily going to outright reject a comic if your's doesn't implement what I describe below, either. But I do consider that having a comic listed on Piperka is a service for your readers and I would like to see my job be easier.
There does exist a specification in HTML 4.01 standard (and later) for a sequential series of documents, like the pages of a comic. I would like to point to the rel attribute in the definition of A and LINK tags. If you look at the link types defined in the standard, you'll find ready definitions for start, prev, next and index. These would neatly correspond to the usual set of links to the first, previous, next and today's page.
If you would apply the rel attribute to your pages, at least the next one, I wouldn't have to try to match the text in the link to the next page or look for key words in the URLs of images or use any other of the tricks I'd need to find that elusive next page. Thank you.
Other policies
- Needs to be crawlable
- Piperka is not a generic webcomic list. I'll pass over comics that I can't write a crawler for. Existing ones that have removed their archives temporarily will still be listed and kept under a watch. Also, if an individual archive page has no link to the next page, it'll remain out.
- Public archives
- The archives will have to be publicly available. Also, they need to stay public too. Exceptions might be made if the comic is not actively removing archives older than n days and has the newest archives available.
- Copyrights
- As a general rule, if the comic doesn't have the copyright to the material used or have a license of some sort for it, it might be better to leave it off Piperka. It's just a clearer situation all around that way.
- Translations
- Piperka will stick to tracking any official translation(s), possibly an unofficial one to English too. One reason for this: see Copyrights above.
- Distinct URLs
- Piperka stores URLs of the pages in the archive. There's any number of tricks to have different pages reside on the same location pointed to by the URL, including using Flash, Javascript or frames. Also, I can't screen scrape Flash.
- Sites that use frames
- If the site uses frames, I will have to unframe them and link directly to the comic frames. Sorry. I may reject the submission if this would break the layout too badly. At the minimum it would be good if there was a link in the comic frame to the main site.
- Cookies
- The comic must be readable without having cookies set.
- One archive per submit
- Some sites have multiple comics on them. If you want to have them all listed, please take the effort to submit each one separately.
- Finished comics
- Comics that have ceased to update for one reason or another but that still have the archives available are OK, as long as it is not just a handful of pages or a preview of some sort.
- I get to decide
- Ultimately, I may reject submissions just on a whim. Feel free to ask about it if I haven't added the comic after a while. Most likely the reason was technical or I have a bit of a backlog.
Submit a comic
This all being said, I do add most requested comics to Piperka as well as some that haven't been asked for yet, too.
And if your comic begins like "The Comic", check around C first. The ordering used is arguably somewhat arbitrary.