On Dec 25, 2015, BloodlustSerenade said:

It's great that you are trying so hard to revive the site and so many of these ideas sound really good - but ultimately if people want a community they need to do their part to create it. It's not all on you.  If people are only submitting their own work and not looking at anyone else's then there's nothing YOU can do about that.  It's on us as well.  It doesn't feel much like a community because the community isn't acting like one.

Agreed that it's not all on me. I can't make people comment. People have to put in an effort but I'm hoping I can at least nudge people in the right direction by reaching out more :D

So far it looks like it's working! Yay!

On Dec 25, 2015, BloodlustSerenade said:

Along those lines, the only real complaint/rant I have at this point is the comment to upload ratio of fellow users.  A few of us are commenting (three!) - but so many others come to simply upload all of their work and then we hear nothing else from them.  Pages and pages of uploads and no comments.  I was commenting a lot at first but it started to feel like work.  I began picking only one or two pics per user based on the thumbnail and then even that was getting old because no one else was commenting and these users weren't paying it forward. You could do all the work on the site in the world and I'd still feel this way if the actual community interaction remained so minimal and felt so one-sided.

I've also noticed the comment to upload ratio has been pretty bad. This is why I decided not to grant points for posting submissions. Most are willing to post something but even less are willing to comment on other people's work. So we should incentivise people for doing what we need more of to make this a community (commenting).

On Dec 25, 2015, BloodlustSerenade said:

The ranking system is a good start (I hope) since even though it doesn't unlock anything I myself (and probably others) tend to respond well to the feeling of achievement regardless of whether or not the achievement actually gives me anything   Again - there is only so much that you can do though.  Once you do what you can to draw new members and keep those here engaged, we all need to get our butts into gear as well if we actually WANT that kind of community.

Yes exactly. Many social games are successful just because people like the feeling of their number increasing (Farmville anyone?). So I hope it will have a similar effect.

Originally when I launched the rank feature, your points and rank didn't update until you logged out and back in again. I just launched a fix to this so that each time you visit another page on the site it updates. So it's much more up to date. This way you can see your number increasing more easily

On Dec 26, 2015, StarKnights said:

one thing i just thought of that might help attract some comics in would be some way to know when the comic has updated - i plan to update my comic here 3 or 4 times a month , if there was a most recent update showing on the comic people would know when a new page was up . just an idea... 

There is a "Follow this comic" button on every page of the comic. If you follow the comic, you'll be notified of updates. It optionally supports emailing you when the comic has updated. Maybe this feature is too buried? Let me know what you think I could do to make this feature more obvious.

This post is getting long. I'll post another reply with my thoughts on the rest of your messages.