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Bit of a bizarre happening today, aside from Los Angeles threatening to drown under a short but very intense thunderstorm (more rain on the way, too, so we’ll see how that goes… every so often Mother Nature loves reminding the Valley that it’s, well… a valley).
Back when I was trying to get some initial word out about Zombie Ranch, I registered for several forums where promoting your comic was fair game. I don’t believe we ever really got much more than a trickle out of those posts, which is to be expected since we really didn’t have much to look at yet. I remember one responder opining that we probably shouldn’t promote ourselves until we had at least 30 strips available for viewing, but we considered that a tad impractical since at our planned rate of posting 30 strips would mean over six months of wait.
That said we haven’t really been too aggressive in promotion since our initial push, since we do want to take the time to get some content built up. No one reads a webcomic because you tell them they have to. I mean, they might, but they’ll only keep reading if they find it worthwhile and to their tastes.
Anyhow, back to the oddity I mentioned, which was a rejection notice from a forum I almost didn’t remember I’d even submitted a registration request for. I had to think about it for a moment because I’m fairly sure I put in the request sometime back in November of last year, and it had largely passed out of mind. I then remembered thinking it odd at the time that it was one of the only public webcomic forums I had checked into that required moderator approval before you could post, rather than just the usual anti-spam measures.
Moderator approval is all well and good, of course, as long as it’s done in a timely manner. Two months is not especially timely, and at the end of it comes a very brief email saying that “regrettably” my application to join has been rejected. Keep in mind this was not an application to be hosted somewhere or get ad space or anything like that; in fact, the application, if it can be called that, was just the usual username/email/password what-are-the-colored-letters-in-the-speckled-box business. I would have had to have been approved before I could even begin to start crafting a profile full of sins against God and man.
Sometimes sites blacklist IP addresses that have offended in the past, but since mine isn’t an IP that hundreds share I can’t imagine that would be the case, unless the wife has been a very naughty girl. Perhaps it was just a more ‘leet sort of forum than it seemed, or perhaps it was just a matter of someone finally getting around to a long backlog of registration requests and doing a mass “NO” to save time and clear the slate. That might be likely considering the news update on the site itself seems to be one of those Under New Management posts after a long dry spell. Perhaps it will be worth trying again in the future, or perhaps I’m really not missing out on much of anything. We’ll see. For now, it was simply an oddity, like a Tickle Me Elmo doll suddenly burbling to the surface of a military academy fountain. It raises questions, but it’s not necessarily something to lose sleep over.
So, sometimes sowing the seeds doesn’t work out. And then again, sometimes it does. Another site that recently got its updates together after a few months was Tomgeeks, and there our much more in-depth application was approved. Tomgeeks is a site that exists mainly to promote webcomics that have someone of the female persuasion on the creative team. Since my better half is also the artistic half of Zombie Ranch, we qualify, and it’s great to be part of such a slick looking website. Dawn was particularly happy to note that Tomgeeks is a “girl” site that does not use any pink in its composition. Dawn hates pink. It makes her angry. Tomgeeks uses very pleasant tones of green instead, and both Dawn and I are great fans of green. But besides that, Tomgeeks is a great jumping off point for browsing all kinds of webcomics, many of which have little in common except that someone involved in writing or drawing them has boobs.
And it really is a very nice shade of green…