ComicArtTracker.com 3 3

[comicwiz]

I've developed search engines, and have a fairly good understanding how CAT is working under the hood. I'm not sure I understand the competitive angle, since it really is a federated search that provides an array of results which would require you to visit the site that has the art you seek, and requires you to stay on that site if you decide to purchase, and/or bid. If anyone has built a model to monetize traffic as suggested, and are concerned with an OA project which drives buyer traffic to affiliate sites and dealers, then they may have to rethink their model. There are numerous ways to achieve a similar, although not as clean/polished GUI as CAT, with various online search tools and aggregators, including ones developed by Google itself. As far as consequential bandwidth issues, if I were an affiliate which saw an uptick in traffic in terms of views, and actual visitors, that should be looked at as a positive. Those who are monitoring this on the backend have a glorious opportunity to track buyer habits, and keep them coming back. I don't want to say much further because I may start to reveal a bias, and I'd like to hear CAF's side of the situation before saying anything further on the decision to exclude certain sites.

[SquareChaos]

Just now, comicwiz said:

I've developed search engines, and have a fairly good understanding how CAT is working under the hood. I'm not sure I understand the competitive angle, since it really is a federated search that provides an array of results which would require you to visit the site that has the art you seek, and requires you to stay on that site if you decide to purchase, and/or bid. If anyone has built a model to monetize traffic as suggested, and are concerned with an OA project which drives buyer traffic to affiliate sites and dealers, then they may have to rethink their model. There are numerous ways to achieve a similar, although not as clean/polished GUI as CAT, with various online search tools and aggregators, including ones developed by Google itself. As far as consequential bandwidth issues, if I were an affiliate which saw an uptick in traffic in terms of views, and actual visitors, that should be looked at as a positive. Those who are monitoring this on the backend have a glorious opportunity to track buyer habits, and keep them coming back. I don't want to say much further because I may start to reveal a bias, and I'd like to hear CAF's side of the situation before saying anything further on the decision to exclude certain sites.

The competitive angle is more speculative and comes from the possibility that CAT becomes the main site that people visit in order to search for comic art at some future point. If you have the traffic and the eyeballs, other opportunities may arise as a direct result.

 

Consider this made up scenario - a year from now 9 out of 10 collectors go directly to CAT to search for art to purchase. When they find a page they like, they click through to the dealer's site and purchase that page. This results in a good user experience, far better than searching all of the sites individually, and so everyone is happy - the collector has new art, the dealer made a sell, excellent. However, end users - being the lazy creatures that we all are - simply no longer visit the dealer sites directly unless they're doing so by clicking through from CAT. What happens if CAT now decides to stop returning X dealer's inventory in their search results? What if they suggest that it'd be easier if dealer's just listed their art directly on CAT? What if some-other-gatekeeping-scenario?

This is how the internet tends to work - high traffic, especially in such a specialized area - can easily become a form of power. Personally... I think the scenario above is very unlikely, but I have seen similar things happen over the last 20 years. In general, business owners in industries that may be considered a commodity industry (such as hosting) tend to be a very conservative and cautious bunch.

[comicwiz]

2 hours ago, SquareChaos said:

The competitive angle is more speculative and comes from the possibility that CAT becomes the main site that people visit in order to search for comic art at some future point. If you have the traffic and the eyeballs, other opportunities may arise as a direct result.

 

Consider this made up scenario - a year from now 9 out of 10 collectors go directly to CAT to search for art to purchase. When they find a page they like, they click through to the dealer's site and purchase that page. This results in a good user experience, far better than searching all of the sites individually, and so everyone is happy - the collector has new art, the dealer made a sell, excellent. However, end users - being the lazy creatures that we all are - simply no longer visit the dealer sites directly unless they're doing so by clicking through from CAT. What happens if CAT now decides to stop returning X dealer's inventory in their search results? What if they suggest that it'd be easier if dealer's just listed their art directly on CAT? What if some-other-gatekeeping-scenario?

This is how the internet tends to work - high traffic, especially in such a specialized area - can easily become a form of power. Personally... I think the scenario above is very unlikely, but I have seen similar things happen over the last 20 years. In general, business owners in industries that may be considered a commodity industry (such as hosting) tend to be a very conservative and cautious bunch.

I don't know if you've been around tech long enough to remember when this was the doom and gloom scenario being described by content publishers, including news sites. Every one was lamenting how Google was infringing on copyright, by providing links to online articles, even though all Google was doing was making it easier to match people with relevant content. Those fights continue with certain opportunistic types to this day, but for the most part people realized what Google did benefitted the technology ecosystem, and also allowed a greater reach and current awareness of the news cycle globally. And consider that a lot of the bellyaching then is now seen as "social sharing" with millions of people each hour sharing news stories and articles on various social media sites.  Similarly to the overestimated threat Google posed, I don't think this is so much a situation where anybody really needs a crystal ball to see this community already recognizes CAT as a benefit by providing a more organized, accelerated system to recall OA for purchase. I also feel that content scraping will have restrictions on technical features, and how CAT monetizes it's system, but for the time being, I'd be curious to better understand how a federated search matching buyers to art they otherwise might never know is out there is a hinderance or threat.

Edited October 29, 2017 by comicwiz

[MyNameIsLegion]

2 hours ago, Nexus said:

Bill Cox just reached out to me and we had a long chat by phone. He has very specific (and IMO, legitimate) reasons for not allowing CAT access to CAF's network of sites. I encouraged him to share them here, which I hope he will.

He does, however, have a compromise in mind. So fingers crossed, Nico will work with him toward a fair resolution for all.

 

 well that's encouraging-  I hope they can work together instead of against each other-  glad you reached out to Bill.

[SquareChaos]

2 minutes ago, comicwiz said:

I don't know if you've been around tech long enough to remember when this was the doom and gloom scenario being described by content publishers, including news sites. Every one was lamenting how Google was infringing on copyright, by providing links to online articles, even though all Google was doing was making it easier to match people with relevant content. Those fights continue with certain opportunistic types, but for the most part people realize what Google did benefitted the technology ecosystem, and also allowed a greater reach and current awareness globally. And consider that a lot of the bellyaching then is now seen as "social sharing" with millions of people each hour sharing news stories and articles on various social media sites. Again, I don't think this is so much as a situation where anybody really needs a crystal ball to see this community already sees CAT providing a more organized, accelerated system to recall OA for purchase. I also feel that content scraping will have restrictions on technical features, and how CAT monetizes it's system, but for the time being, I'd be curious to better understand how a federated search matching buyers to art them might not even know is out there is a hinderance.

Google has incredible power... they have the power to absolutely destroy entire online industries if they so wish. They have destroyed many simply by changing the way their indexing works, choosing to exclude certain people and things...  Content publishers (including news sites) of all kinds have also been decimated by current trends, changing social attitudes towards information, and changing technology... I'm uncertain what point you're attempting to make here, I've read a number of very well thought out and interesting comments from you on these forums so I think it likely I may be missing the main point, not the other way around. But much of what you're saying here seems to line up with what I am attempting to describe from a sort of... worst possible outcome that a business owner may have to consider when looking at CAT.

 

[comicwiz]

I'm speaking in the context of a federated search, that is reliant on sources who are receptive to being included. We already are seeing one of the numerous limitations with such a system. My point in the earlier comment is the threat is being overestimated, if that is the reason why CAT is being blocked.

Edited October 29, 2017 by comicwiz

[SquareChaos]

2 minutes ago, comicwiz said:

I'm speaking in the context of a federated search, that is reliant on sources who are receptive to being included. We already are seeing the limitations with such a system. My point in the earlier comment is the threat is being overestimated, if that is the reason why CAT is being blocked.

I am not certain I agree, but going by Felix's comment, maybe we'll see a customer-friendly solution soon 

[Bill Cox]

3 hours ago, SquareChaos said:

I like CAT, as a developer I respect the work and time you've put in to it. I think the result you're driving towards is a better end user experience than the pre-existing alternative... but I also think your analogy here is incredibly misleading.

I highly doubt Bill would ever have the concern that Google is going to begin specializing in the original comic art niche as a potential competitor to his own business model, while alternatively, it would be somewhat reckless not to consider CAT a potential threat for reasons already mentioned. That is just the facts of the matter. And when one views this scenario from that perspective, you're simply taking other people's data to drive CAT.

I personally hope something can be worked out, something that results in a better experience for the collector / consumer, something that utilizes all of the hard work you've put into this project, but I'm currently dubious. If the worst occurs, you'll have three choices; you can become a competitor in the truest sense of the word, you can ignore their wishes (find ways around the blacklist), or CAT likely dies as you don't have your own data and at it's core, the site is fully data driven.

So many posts here that I could reply to but this seems like the best place to start. I'll get back to Nico's google comments and SquareChaos' reply after addressing a few other things that were brought up...

First, we scraped sites 14 years ago when CAF launched, so we did do this same approach early on. We abandoned it for several reasons like getting push back from site owners that we were scraping their site for content, but also the fact that the results were not in real time. As a collector I wanted something better. We abandoned that scraping approach on CAF when we decided to help comic art dealers build better sites, which in turn allowed us to build our own central inventory of dealer art for sale data that updated in real time. If you've been around long enough I'm sure you remember when sites like Spencer Beck's were the norm, and every collector who had a website used geocities for free hosting. Better dealer sites built on the robust and expensive network that we created and maintain, along with a centralized art for sale search on CAF, changed the hobby in many positive ways. Free gallery space gave CAF it's start and truly does make it continue to stand out today, but commerce backed by the work we did to make art for sale more accessible on many levels from dealers, collectors and other marketplaces and auction houses continues to be just as important. 

There was also something said about us resting on our rears and not doing anything new on CAF in years which is absurd. We are working on CAF every day. Sometimes that work can be mundane like answering support emails, optimizing searches, assisting dealers on current and upcoming sites, and so on, but most often it's working on enhancing existing features, and working on new ones. Because we offer premium memberships to folks who primarily want to support the site, many of the new things we do tend to be features we make more available to premium members only, so some things go unnoticed. Premium members can get daily updates on their favorite keywords for collector items, dealer items or classifieds. They have a dashboard that allows them to see these same things when they visit CAF. They get emailed every hour when new items for sale are posted. It's a long list, and many of things have been added to or created in the last year or two. Like CAT, we gave everything away when we were first starting out - there were not even ads on CAF for 3 or 4 years. And like CAT we were collectors first, so we were building the site into something that we wanted to see available to everyone in the hobby, to make finding comic art to browse or buy as easy it could be. We subsidised all the costs in time spent working on CAF through my consulting business, at a considerable loss as you might imagine. But CAF has always been a labor of love for us, and to this day it's the thing I wake up to every morning and the thing that usually ends my evening in one form or another.

So could I go back to scraping sites and bring in art for sale for dealers and marketplaces I don't host? It's possible. Maybe we could give away some lighter versions of the premium features available today? I guess I could do that too. I already have all the same features CAT offers they are just presented differently, so extending those features to over 50k active registered users would not be that big a deal. I will have to consider all my options and come to some decisions, but I can say those changes would not be not my first choice. 

CAF's website, the Dealer sites, the image content network, our mailing systems used by the dealers and CAF, the servers we own and replace every few years, the backup systems we maintain, the secure server rackspace we pay for, and the bandwidth to run all these things are very costly. It is more than most people's monthly mortgage payments, even for the big shark's in our hobby. If any one of those things fail a pretty significant part of the comic art world collapses until we get it fixed, and I'd say that over the last 15 years we've done a decent job of keeping this hobby growing daily with little downtime. I do support my family on the income we derive from all the things we do in this area, and I do get by month to month as there are always challenges we face like hosting increases, partnership % decreases, advertisers and premium members come and go and so on. However, I would not change this lifestyle for a thing because I love what we do.

Getting back to my reply to this post, and the general discussion at hand. When we chose to build comic art dealer sites we did so to create a valuable resource to the dealers that chose to work with us, and collectors looking to buy/locate artwork through CAF's varied methods. Our dealer sites are very much geared to selling comic art, managing repped artists, and so on. We continue to build all our dealer sites at 1/3 to 1/4 what I would charge a normal design client for the amount of things we have put into our systems for them, the robust network that hosts them, and the monthly/annual hosting fees I charge them. We literally make nothing from designing and hosting these sites. Our benefit is from providing a service to collectors to find art for sale that normally would not be possible in a given day through CAF, and the dealers gain access to the 300k visitors to the site we get each month and the free exposure we provide their art for sale, as well as the more targetted features the premium members have access to. I benefit in no affiliate manner from the leads and sales I provide to art dealers. As it relates to Google, of course I want them and all typical search engines spidering pages on CAF and each art dealer, and I've made all sites very SEO friendly. I want every dealer and art representative I work with to become incredibly successful, and having a good SEO approach is part of ensuring that - even when the lead to the dealer doesn't involve CAF. Everyone, collectors included, benefit from this approach. And while Google might spider over 250,000 pages on my network every day they do leave a rather small footprint, which we appreciate.

Which brings me to CAT. CAT did not leave a small footprint when it scraped my server/database network nor my content delivery network. Last month we saw a huge spike in traffic come across both our networks which usually comes from an Amazon Web Service bot. We're talking several hundred dollars in overage fees in just a few weeks. Our content network charges us the most so after several days we chose to block access there while we tried to determine where this rogue activity was coming from. It was at this point that we learned about CAT just from doing some IP traces. Personally I thought they would have been talking to us all along but it wasn't until a few days after we blocked them from our content network that Nico first reached out to me, cordial but unhappy that he no longer had unfettered access to my network. The cost is the biggest issue to me. To look at it from my perspective, Nico is asking me to indirectly fund his personally inexpensive to host scraping application, using my costly to maintain robust network. While I agree with comicwiz (and Niko) that there are many free ways to do exactly what CAT and CAF both already do as it relates to showing art for sale, it is competitive from an application/website perspective. So I fund his application development while he slowly takes marketshare from CAF for something we already provide to some of our members. It is a conundrum. Hopefully now you understand my position.

Nico's one suggestion about copying every dealer image is not going to work. While I told him I did not think it would work well for either of us, I did suggest that paying for access to my network with other restrictions was the best I could come up with. He did not pursue that suggestion, nor offer anything more. That was the end of our discussion.

So here we are today. I have no interest in asking all of my art dealers to pay more money to allow this to occur. I have no interest in asking my advertisers to pay more to cover the additional costs this would require. I reached out to Nexus a few hours ago, not because he approached me bearing any pitchforked messages from his clients, but because he's someone I respect and I wanted to present to him what I felt was a compromise in this situation. He agreed with the main point in my approach to resolution so all I can say is we'll see what happens. It might take a day or two to put my compromise together to present him as I have a few other folks to talk to. I'm sure you'll all know the outcome to this later this week.

Best,
Bill Cox

[comix4fun]

Thank you Bill, 

I'm inclined to trust your approach to this as you are not only a veteran and innovator in Comic Art on the internet, but also because you've transformed the hobby drastically from what it was before CAF came along.

A lot of people may not remember what it used to be like in both displaying your collection and in finding and networking with other collectors, but I do. I owe you the largest debt of gratitude for the shape and form and quality of my collection today and the enjoyment I've been able to experience as a result. 

Anything that preserves CAF from a relevancy and financial viability standpoint will be something I support.  No one should expect CAF to bear the financial burden, or be forced to pass it on to its users and hosted sites, simply so a new site can have it free and easy in exchange. 

Hopefully you can work this out. You've earned your place and your stature in this hobby and I am glad you're working towards a solution.

Best,

Chris

[Brian Peck]

4 hours ago, Bill Cox said:

So many posts here that I could reply to but this seems like the best place to start. I'll get back to Nico's google comments and SquareChaos' reply after addressing a few other things that were brought up...

First, we scraped sites 14 years ago when CAF launched, so we did do this same approach early on. We abandoned it for several reasons like getting push back from site owners that we were scraping their site for content, but also the fact that the results were not in real time. As a collector I wanted something better. We abandoned that scraping approach on CAF when we decided to help comic art dealers build better sites, which in turn allowed us to build our own central inventory of dealer art for sale data that updated in real time. If you've been around long enough I'm sure you remember when sites like Spencer Beck's were the norm, and every collector who had a website used geocities for free hosting. Better dealer sites built on the robust and expensive network that we created and maintain, along with a centralized art for sale search on CAF, changed the hobby in many positive ways. Free gallery space gave CAF it's start and truly does make it continue to stand out today, but commerce backed by the work we did to make art for sale more accessible on many levels from dealers, collectors and other marketplaces and auction houses continues to be just as important. 

There was also something said about us resting on our rears and not doing anything new on CAF in years which is absurd. We are working on CAF every day. Sometimes that work can be mundane like answering support emails, optimizing searches, assisting dealers on current and upcoming sites, and so on, but most often it's working on enhancing existing features, and working on new ones. Because we offer premium memberships to folks who primarily want to support the site, many of the new things we do tend to be features we make more available to premium members only, so some things go unnoticed. Premium members can get daily updates on their favorite keywords for collector items, dealer items or classifieds. They have a dashboard that allows them to see these same things when they visit CAF. They get emailed every hour when new items for sale are posted. It's a long list, and many of things have been added to or created in the last year or two. Like CAT, we gave everything away when we were first starting out - there were not even ads on CAF for 3 or 4 years. And like CAT we were collectors first, so we were building the site into something that we wanted to see available to everyone in the hobby, to make finding comic art to browse or buy as easy it could be. We subsidised all the costs in time spent working on CAF through my consulting business, at a considerable loss as you might imagine. But CAF has always been a labor of love for us, and to this day it's the thing I wake up to every morning and the thing that usually ends my evening in one form or another.

So could I go back to scraping sites and bring in art for sale for dealers and marketplaces I don't host? It's possible. Maybe we could give away some lighter versions of the premium features available today? I guess I could do that too. I already have all the same features CAT offers they are just presented differently, so extending those features to over 50k active registered users would not be that big a deal. I will have to consider all my options and come to some decisions, but I can say those changes would not be not my first choice. 

CAF's website, the Dealer sites, the image content network, our mailing systems used by the dealers and CAF, the servers we own and replace every few years, the backup systems we maintain, the secure server rackspace we pay for, and the bandwidth to run all these things are very costly. It is more than most people's monthly mortgage payments, even for the big shark's in our hobby. If any one of those things fail a pretty significant part of the comic art world collapses until we get it fixed, and I'd say that over the last 15 years we've done a decent job of keeping this hobby growing daily with little downtime. I do support my family on the income we derive from all the things we do in this area, and I do get by month to month as there are always challenges we face like hosting increases, partnership % decreases, advertisers and premium members come and go and so on. However, I would not change this lifestyle for a thing because I love what we do.

Getting back to my reply to this post, and the general discussion at hand. When we chose to build comic art dealer sites we did so to create a valuable resource to the dealers that chose to work with us, and collectors looking to buy/locate artwork through CAF's varied methods. Our dealer sites are very much geared to selling comic art, managing repped artists, and so on. We continue to build all our dealer sites at 1/3 to 1/4 what I would charge a normal design client for the amount of things we have put into our systems for them, the robust network that hosts them, and the monthly/annual hosting fees I charge them. We literally make nothing from designing and hosting these sites. Our benefit is from providing a service to collectors to find art for sale that normally would not be possible in a given day through CAF, and the dealers gain access to the 300k visitors to the site we get each month and the free exposure we provide their art for sale, as well as the more targetted features the premium members have access to. I benefit in no affiliate manner from the leads and sales I provide to art dealers. As it relates to Google, of course I want them and all typical search engines spidering pages on CAF and each art dealer, and I've made all sites very SEO friendly. I want every dealer and art representative I work with to become incredibly successful, and having a good SEO approach is part of ensuring that - even when the lead to the dealer doesn't involve CAF. Everyone, collectors included, benefit from this approach. And while Google might spider over 250,000 pages on my network every day they do leave a rather small footprint, which we appreciate.

Which brings me to CAT. CAT did not leave a small footprint when it scraped my server/database network nor my content delivery network. Last month we saw a huge spike in traffic come across both our networks which usually comes from an Amazon Web Service bot. We're talking several hundred dollars in overage fees in just a few weeks. Our content network charges us the most so after several days we chose to block access there while we tried to determine where this rogue activity was coming from. It was at this point that we learned about CAT just from doing some IP traces. Personally I thought they would have been talking to us all along but it wasn't until a few days after we blocked them from our content network that Nico first reached out to me, cordial but unhappy that he no longer had unfettered access to my network. The cost is the biggest issue to me. To look at it from my perspective, Nico is asking me to indirectly fund his personally inexpensive to host scraping application, using my costly to maintain robust network. While I agree with comicwiz (and Niko) that there are many free ways to do exactly what CAT and CAF both already do as it relates to showing art for sale, it is competitive from an application/website perspective. So I fund his application development while he slowly takes marketshare from CAF for something we already provide to some of our members. It is a conundrum. Hopefully now you understand my position.

Nico's one suggestion about copying every dealer image is not going to work. While I told him I did not think it would work well for either of us, I did suggest that paying for access to my network with other restrictions was the best I could come up with. He did not pursue that suggestion, nor offer anything more. That was the end of our discussion.

So here we are today. I have no interest in asking all of my art dealers to pay more money to allow this to occur. I have no interest in asking my advertisers to pay more to cover the additional costs this would require. I reached out to Nexus a few hours ago, not because he approached me bearing any pitchforked messages from his clients, but because he's someone I respect and I wanted to present to him what I felt was a compromise in this situation. He agreed with the main point in my approach to resolution so all I can say is we'll see what happens. It might take a day or two to put my compromise together to present him as I have a few other folks to talk to. I'm sure you'll all know the outcome to this later this week.

Best,
Bill Cox

Bill,

I completely agree with you. CAF has been the best resource for the comic art collector for 14 years. Even got better when it added support for searching many of the dealers site. I have been a premium member since the beginning, I always like supporting you efforts. I have tried CAT but find its still lacking, alot of data but slow in display it. The free option is nice but in the end it lives off the back of others who already did the work hosting the data. Scrapping sites is a cheap and dirty way to get the info but it does entail costs to others. CAT should contribute to the cost of taxing the bandwidths of sites they copy data from.

[Brian Peck]

2 hours ago, comix4fun said:

Thank you Bill, 

I'm inclined to trust your approach to this as you are not only a veteran and innovator in Comic Art on the internet, but also because you've transformed the hobby drastically from what it was before CAF came along.

A lot of people may not remember what it used to be like in both displaying your collection and in finding and networking with other collectors, but I do. I owe you the largest debt of gratitude for the shape and form and quality of my collection today and the enjoyment I've been able to experience as a result. 

Anything that preserves CAF from a relevancy and financial viability standpoint will be something I support.  No one should expect CAF to bear the financial burden, or be forced to pass it on to its users and hosted sites, simply so a new site can have it free and easy in exchange. 

Hopefully you can work this out. You've earned your place and your stature in this hobby and I am glad you're working towards a solution.

Best,

Chris

I remember when most people could just post ONLY 5 pieces of art on the Lowry.

[MyNameIsLegion]

I remember when Bruce Lowry was still alive, and there was no Lowry Gallery to post anything to at all....

[vodou]

12 hours ago, Bill Cox said:

There was also something said about us resting on our rears and not doing anything new on CAF in years which is absurd. We are working on CAF every day...

Hi Bill...my actual words were "resting on your laurels". And while I do appreciate your perspective and your taking the time to share it in detail, I stand by that critique. I've no doubt that the service side of owning/operating CAF is massive (relative to a small company staff/budget) but as it was in the beginning and remains today CAF is absolutely inward facing. It's a comic art echo chamber (that depends on users as product to load/view/interact with content; no users = no content save advertisements, hosted sites and staff collections). All the CAF features trawl only CAF content and contracted for external content. The hobby (not just North Americans but globally), the market, wants more. Every couple of years we get a new Herge Tintin record set somewhere...it's never in North America and it's never a piece on CAF. So whatever that market is, whatever the CAT market is attempting to service...CAF is largely not. If that wasn't the case beta-CAT wouldn't even be a discussion. Nobody would give a rat's you-know-what. It would be DOA. This thread alone is evidence that is not the case.

13 hours ago, Bill Cox said:

...we were collectors first, so we were building the site into something that we wanted to see available to everyone in the hobby, to make finding comic art to browse or buy as easy it could be. We subsidised all the costs in time spent working on CAF through my consulting business, at a considerable loss as you might imagine. But CAF has always been a labor of love for us, and to this day it's the thing I wake up to every morning and the thing that usually ends my evening in one form or another.

...

He [Nexus] agreed with the main point in my approach to resolution so all I can say is we'll see what happens. It might take a day or two to put my compromise together to present him as I have a few other folks to talk to. I'm sure you'll all know the outcome to this later this week.

Best,
Bill Cox

CAF is your business to run as you wish, of course, but solutions to problems unaddressed do eventually bubble up to the surface. Ever advancing technology and globalism only makes this come faster, cheaper and from literally any corner of the world now, especially if it's a tech problem to begin with. If it's not NicoV it will be somebody else somewhere else eventually giving the hobby the services it wants. Whether that service is worth the development/implementation cost and price to users at this time is another matter. If not now, it will be sooner than later. Search is everything, the bigger and wider...the better. I'll suggest this may be a juncture where CAF begins to lose it's market* dominance by not embracing the novelty of a wider than core/dedicated audience, perhaps similar to when Western Union rejected Alexander Graham Bell's approach that telegraph infrastructure could very easily accommodate voice transmission as well. We all know what came after, but if nothing else there was and is ample room in the market for both Western Union and Bell Telephone to continue to be profitable endeavors to this day.

I look forward to what sort of compromise you and your folks come up with, I think we'd all prefer that CAF and CAT work seamlessly, or if that's not possible then at least not combatively. It's certainly not impossible for dedicated fans to run two query sets daily instead of one!

*The cost/benefit of that market to CAF I'll leave to you and your willingness to eat losses or work for a less than equitable wage. Again I don't doubt that CAF costs you more than it brings in, but I also know that one business unit subsidized by other business units to that extent over the long term is not a business but rather a hobby, charity situation, or something else. That's okay, you've told us that before and I don't think anybody begrudges that sacrifice, we all appreciate it too. CAF is excellent at what it does, and is at present the internet beacon for North American/English-language comic/illustration art. All of the above simply asks whether that will be the case in the future and whether anybody cares or not.

[NicoV]

Hi Bill,

Thanks for answering and detailing your point of view! As everybody here, I consider that you did great thing for our hobbit hobby when creating CAF. I appreciate your story about the early days of how CAF started, and also the time and money it takes to manage. I'll just react to one point:

16 hours ago, Bill Cox said:

While I told him I did not think it would work well for either of us, I did suggest that paying for access to my network with other restrictions was the best I could come up with. He did not pursue that suggestion, nor offer anything more. That was the end of our discussion.

The last message I received regarding this was: "I considered asking for monetary compensation along with other requirements but I don’t believe that will work out well for both of us. So I do not see this working out."  It did not seem to me as if you were open to any discussion at this point, but sorry if I misunderstood. If you have another proposal for API access, I will wait for your ideas!

Also, if you saw a traffic spike for dealers' sites during the CAT beta launch, I would consider that a good thing! Many users have reported here or by PM that they have already made purchases from those dealers.

Edited October 30, 2017 by NicoV
No no no, I was not talking about small guys with big hairy feet...

[▫️]

21 minutes ago, NicoV said:

As everybody here, I consider that you did great thing for our hobbit when creating CAF.

Nerd.

[SquareChaos]

The hobby needs a mascot... yes, we need the original comic art Hobbit.

[NicoV]

Oh my God, did I really write "hobbit" ?! 

Edited October 30, 2017 by NicoV

[NicoV]

Hi everybody,

I just wanted to let you know that we found a compromise with Bill that we both like, which means that all dealers from the CAF Dealer Marketplace will soon be back on ComicArtTracker. And as good news never come alone, this cooperation with CAF will allow me to index the CAF Classifieds as well. So... thank you Bill!

It will take some time to put everything in place but we expect to be ready by the end of the month.

[Nexus]

[artistlost]

Excellent news!