I’m going to approach this review in the same way that I approached the review of ComicGenesis. Here’s the same scenario:  you have a comic you’re working on, right now, on your desk,  and you want to make it a webcomic. The only problem is, you have no idea how to put it online. You know nothing about hosts, servers, or registrars.  You also have no money to pay for that anyways.  You stumble across a listing of free webcomic hosting sites, and you’re deciding between them.  But wait! How will you know which one is best? Well, here is my review of one of those free webcomic hosts: Drunk Duck!

Here is my short review: DD is a great place for people who really need and desire a lot of comments on their work. For attention-starved artists or writers, there is no better place to be.  As was stated in the TWCL forums by Metruis, you can have a very small audience on DD and still get way more comments than, say, a comic with a much larger audience on ComicGenesis. Why? Because the place is literally BUILT for people to comment.  However, and this is a big “however” for me, DrunkDuck will vex the hell out of someone who wants more control over the website. Remember, one of my biggest gripes with webcomics is when people approach their project as ONLY a comic, forgetting it’s a WEBcomic. How a comic is displayed and the functionality of the site are incredibly important. DD makes it far harder than it needs to be for a web-savvy person to take advantage of their coding knowledge!

PROS:

Commenting: As I discussed previously, there is an ability (and built-in encouragement) for people to comment.  This is the biggest pro I can think of for DrunkDuck…for reasons that follow in the Cons section. Anyways, DD has a 1-5 rating system, and only people signed in can comment. The rating system and signing in ability is something unique to DD, and it allows comic creators to moderate comments on their page.

Noob-worthy CMS: If you know absolutely nothing about HTML, CSS, PHP or CMS (indeed, if you don’t even know what these acronyms stand for), DrunkDuck is the place for you. First, CMS stands for Content Management System. You have content, and you need to manage it in the most automatic way possible.  DrunkDuck is set up so you never even have to look at code. You just…click things! Easy as pie! They even have automatic templates and extra cool little features on their “Dashboard,” like stats and visitors.  You can also add co-creators, edit news, comic pages, site templates, all online—and therefore from any computer.

Community: DrunkDuck is one of the tightest webcomic communities out there. If you bother to even show up in the forums and post occasionally, you WILL make friends. Making friends, online, is a form of networking to increase your audience size.  Everybody wants a bigger audience, so this is a good thing! The forums are highly active, and new members join all the time.  The only time I’ve seen it hard to become “one of the gang” is when it’s obvious you’re not interested in being a member there, only to try send more readers to another site. Then, you will be a pariah, so beware!

Upload Multiple Pages at Once: If you have a very big back-log of pages, and you want to upload them in batches, or just have them up all at once, DrunkDuck allows you to do this.  This really isn’t too large a pro unless you DO have a large archive, for example, if you want to create a mirror site.  DD was the last host I’m aware of to implement being able to upload more than once page at once.

Can modify the majority of elements on a webpage: DD allows you to modify your webpage code, for users who wish to. Since the automated portions of DD’s CMS are “tags,” you can move around a single snippet of code to get desired results. Even if you don’t know how to code, you could do this with a little patience.

Featured webcomics as a means of cross-advertising: DD has “featured webcomics” on its front page.  Comics are chosen out of the thousands there to be linked on the front page for about 5-7 days. This is free, often random, and a huge boost to your audience numbers.  However, your comic must actually be somewhat GOOD to be featured, so it doesn’t happen to everyone.

Can favorite and track  updates too: Unlike other webcomic hosts, DD allows you to favorite and track updates of comics. This is a feature that is part community, part networking, and in my opinion, something that ought to be implemented in other hosting sites.

CONS:

And this is where I start to scream. DrunkDuck is ABSURDLY ad-heavy. There’s an ad at the top of the page, beneath the comic, and at the bottom of the page. THREE ADS. Per page. One ad is acceptable, 3 is overkill, by a long shot.  You have no control over these ads either, and they all are automatic.  They will appear whether they are hard-coded or not.

DD is often slow, sometimes unreachable: Because of many factors, DD is a pain in the rear to use, both as a reader and as a comic creator.  The ads slow the page loading. The entire SYSTEM of DD (posting pages, logging in and commenting) relies on a mySQL database, and I swear, half the time I try to use the site, I get mySQL error warnings. For a site this large, with this much traffic, it is uancceptable. NO OTHER HOST HAS AS MUCH DOWNTIME AS DRUNKDUCK. So far. >.<

A history of going off-line: DrunkDuck has “gone down” at least once (and I believe TWICE, but it was before my time), like a flaming tub of lard. EVERYONE there lost all their material, without explanation.  There was no data retrieval, or even an effort to let anyone know what happened. This is an unacceptable business practice.

Owned by Platinum Studios: More than a year ago, perhaps 2 now, DD was bought out by Platinum Studios. In case you haven’t heard, Platinum is basically bankrupt. This buyout coincides with when DD became a horrible place for a webcomic to be hosted: when the ads appeared, when things got slow, when half the featured comics were published by Platinum Studios…etc.  Basically, due to the bad track record of Platinum (the DJ Coffman incident, WOWIO, etc), I encourage people not to rely on DD always being there.

Very difficult to customize a webpage: I’m getting tired of writing it, and you’re probably getting tired of reading it: A webcomic is half comic, and half WEB. DrunkDuck makes it very difficult to customize a webpage.  Because you don’t have FTP access, and not even an intelligent file manager, you are forced to jump through hoops to customize anything.  You must edit your home page through a online interface only, one that does not even have a preview function. All files, such as images or other webpages, must be loaded ONE AT A TIME. There is no bulk uploading. Files that you upload also have the habit of mysteriously vanishing, without warning, and refuse to remain in your account.  This, of all the cons, makes me the angriest!

Being hosted at DD will STIFLE your growth. You need to learn to use the entire web (which is more than just DD, people) to advertise your comic, and help it grow.  DD teaches you to rely on a system that is inherently set up to condone web-ignorance. Your comic will never reach its full potential on DD, I really don’t care how many comments you get.  If you can’t be self-sufficient, if you need the random comments of young kids “5-ing” you with each update, you really have no idea what it’s going to be like outside the nest.  The BEST webcomics take advantage of what the web, and coding, and CMS has to offer.

DrunkDuck is full of young, inexperienced comic creators, or conversely, print-comic creators uninterested in making webcomics (they just want to advertise their print comics, and have no real interest in becoming part of the webcomic community). This isn’t a bad thing for them so much as it is for a person seriously invested in their comics.  I am very happy that those young, inexperience comic creators have a free and easy place to BECOME experienced, and that those print-comic creators have the ability to increase their web advertising.  But, as a person always trying to improve my own comics, to increase their audience, these two groupss only hold me back. I don’t need to be “5-ing” or people who look down on webcomics, I need colleagues at MY level. Serious writers and artists will find DD a hindrance.

Finally, DD does not give you a subdomain. A subdomain would be “comic.drunkduck.com.” Instead, you get “drunkduck.com/comic.” What does this mean? Well, you lose a LOT of SEO opportunities.  You can’t use perma-links, for one.  You can’t be an advertiser of ads by places other than Project Wonderful for two (they require at the very least, a subdomain.) You can’t increase your pagerank as much as you would if you had your own domain. As far as I’m aware, you can’t even mirror your DD account at your own URL, you have to forward it instead. For example, I could not make it so that warofwinds.com showed my DD page. Instead, I would have to FORWARD warofwinds.com to drunkduck.com/warofwinds.  This is a huge limitation to your growth!

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With my lambasting complete, DrunkDuck scores a 5/10.  Because you CAN customize your page (regardless of the difficulty of it), and you DO have a CMS (even if it’s…intelligence-challenged), and there IS a strong community, DD has a lot of things going for it. But due to bad managment, a bad history, and all-around FRUSTRATION, I can’t speak very highly of DD as a reliable host where you could stay for quite some time and GROW.

The next review will be of Comic Dish or Webcomics Nation, but before that (since I will be trying out each host before I write a review of it), a few other, shorter, articles.  Thank you everyone who posted your opinions about the ComicGenesis review.