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Post by Huntress on Mar 24, 2018 10:35:29 GMT -5
On one hand I'm a bit late to this party because it seems to have been an issue for ages; on the other hand there's been no actual party on this topic save for a few comments on other comment threads and such. So this felt like new thread material.
I read the NT sort of in cycles and not very often these days (fo'shame) but I'm currently back in NT-reading-mode because I'm currently also back in comic-making mode (let's see how long that lasts xD). And there just aren't any custom thumbnails in the comic section any more. There used to be a mix of user-submitted and staff-picked thumbnails; usually the longer-running comics or the more established artists had a thumbnail they made themselves. And I refuse to believe that nobody sends them in any more. Chances are that the system just eats them.
Now, a while ago I submitted a comic and a thumbnail as one does, comic got published, thumbnail didn't show. I went 'hm', did a bit of research, found the nt_editor lookup and learned from there that comic thumbnails must be 30k in size at most. Excellent intel that should maybe go on the submission page, ahem, but I took note, PMed the editor, got the thumbnail changed, edited my thumbnail to lose the extra 2k and sent it in with my next comic.
Next comic still didn't show the thumbnail despite the latter being within the size limit. I gave a slightly more pointed 'hm' and implemented a backup plan: I uploaded the thumbnail to imgur and post a link to it in the submission form comments saying 'if thumbnail didn't upload, use: (link) '. They've been going up no problem now, also being straight-up the only custom thumbnails in the entire issue.
Today I started digging around a bit and found out that the last three times I sent in a thumbnail with a backup link, the image they display in the NT is actually linked to my imgur.
Jolly good thing I no longer use photobucket, because if I was using a service provider that doesn't assign random filenames, I could totally change that same image into boobs and it would happily show up in the NT. Not sure if smart business practice. This also tells me that thumbnails aren't uploading (because they resort to using my backup link).
TLDR: if you want to submit your own thumbnail to the NT:
- Make sure it's below 30k.
- Also, you might want to use my method and submit a backup link.
- Also, don't link somewhere that's bandwidth- or time-sensitive.
- Also, don't change it into boobs afterwards.
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Post by Twillie on Mar 24, 2018 19:05:02 GMT -5
Ah, thank you!! I remember that issue with custom thumbnails before, but it's been long enough since I've submitted a comic that I haven't had to worry about it and it slipped my mind.
For my last Blossoms series, I remember uploading the image onto a petpage, which also worked out well, and CQ actually addressed my question of "What's up?" while messaging her the new image link. Looking back, she said "Well the only thing I can think of is that if you have entered your thumbnails in HTML then they won't show up. Until, that gets figured out though I will use that picture! Thanks!" I didn't use HTML, by the by, and it kinda sounds like even CQ didn't know what the problem was.
I'm wondering if it'd be worth bringing up to Scrappy now that she's editor, since she might be able to look into the issue more closely. Because as it is, it's really a shame that people aren't able to use custom comic thumbnails without going through extra, unspoken steps.
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Post by Huntress on Mar 25, 2018 3:12:08 GMT -5
For my last Blossoms series, I remember uploading the image onto a petpage, which also worked out well, and CQ actually addressed my question of "What's up?" while messaging her the new image link. I in fact looked into your comic history as well when I was doing my thumbnail-related Sherlocking (you were the first decently-recently active long-running author that came to mind) and the entirety of your last series - starting with Secrets: Part One in issue 772 - has thumbnails that link to your Photobucket. My thumbnail-problems started well before then, with issue 708, but when I neomailed the editor the first few times I sent a link to my earlier published thumbnails that are uploaded to the Neopets servers, so it's not entirely clear in hindsight when the whole system might've broke'd. In other words, might want to avoid deleting your Photobucket and hope that it won't go on a fritz like it has for many people recently xP So I see it as a two-part issue: one is that the thumbnail uploading system is all *sad fanfare* and has been at least for the past three years. The other is that when they do get thumbnails via various backdoors, they no longer upload them to their servers and instead piggyback on whatever hosts we provide. For the former, I might try to submit a ticket; dunno how much that helps but I reckon that not doing anything helps even less, so eh. The latter is just plain weird, because they're clearly still uploading comics and a thumbnail is six times smaller than one comic. There's no reason whatsoever why they can't still upload thumbnails to NT servers instead of sneakily relying on user hosting. Basically, I'll try to neomail the editor to see if I can get my piggybacked images rehosted by the site and also to see if they'll tell me what up. There's arguably also a third issue, namely that they haven't told us anything and each individual user is left to find out the hard way that thumbnails be dead >__> But that's precisely what this forum has always been good for. |
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Post by Huntress on Apr 3, 2018 9:35:35 GMT -5
More intel for my begrudging thumbnail crusade, whoo!
I did submit a bug report and sent a neomail to the editor. The ticket got a surprisingly fast response; it effectively said that they're aware of the problem, but eh, prodding them was about the best I could hope for.
Also got a response from Jade today, which went:
Now I'm torn between going "eh sure whatevs" and dropping the matter, and responding to point out that in this case the information on the nt_editor lookup is hella misleading, what with the bit about "If your comic thumbnail did not show up, it was too big! Send a smaller version along with your next comic and let us know in the comments so we can update the earlier one if needed."
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Post by Kaljinyu on Apr 3, 2018 16:13:09 GMT -5
I'm curious about this, does anyone know why custom thumbnails aren't actually being saved by the editor anymore? Why they're being linked directly from people's Imgurs and Photobuckets and Imageshacks? Did Scrappy or Jade mention that? Is this something they're not doing anymore? Saving the custom thumbnails people make?
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Post by Huntress on Apr 4, 2018 7:04:32 GMT -5
I'm curious about this, does anyone know why custom thumbnails aren't actually being saved by the editor anymore? Why they're being linked directly from people's Imgurs and Photobuckets and Imageshacks? Did Scrappy or Jade mention that? Is this something they're not doing anymore? Saving the custom thumbnails people make? No clue, so we can only speculate. What I asked in my neomail to the editor was to replace the imgur-hotlinked Shad and Saura thumbnail with a link to the same thumbnail in the Neopets servers, since they're sitting there from my past entries anyway. Jade's response, as seen above, was "Nope, we don't do that". I didn't outright ask why - ran out of character space xP - but I did point out that it's not exactly safe practice. in short, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Any custom thumbnails I've been able to find in the past couple years' NT have invariably been hotlinked: Twillie's comics, Komori's most recent ones, not to mention the few weird cases discussed in this thread. Not really the sort of thing you notice easily because once you get a thumbnail published, it doesn't occur to you to check where it links to and the default assumption is that it's on Neopets servers. I noticed moreorless by accident, once I started digging around. It can't possibly be because of lack of server space (thumbnails are tiny) and the thumbnail uploading option is still there so it's a safe-ish bet that they intend to still accept them. My best guess is that it just doesn't occur to them that there's anything wrong with piggybacking on other hosts - it's 2018 on the internet, imagehosts have pretty good capacity, a lot of people will link from anywhere without a second thought - in short, NBD. Cos really, it's not like there's a technical problem with the NT using my imgur, it's a decently reliable host. It's just that if you're a company with a staff and servers and the whole nine yards, it feels, well, glaringly unprofessional xP |
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Post by Ian Wolf-Park on Apr 4, 2018 12:00:13 GMT -5
Huntress- I think it also has something to do with the lack of knowledge, something which you alluded to in your post. I don't know how recent this has been occurring as it probably was not that much of a problem when Viacom was running it, or if there was, it was not as noticable. However, when Droplet was let go and Country Queen took over, I don't think Droplet had the chance to properly show CQ what to do, or what was shown was at best, the basics. Due to this, when Scrappy (and Jade) took over from CQ, they were taught/shown what CQ was given to her. This is pure speculation on my part.
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Post by Kaljinyu on Apr 8, 2018 14:15:16 GMT -5
Huntress - I think it also has something to do with the lack of knowledge, something which you alluded to in your post. I don't know how recent this has been occurring as it probably was not that much of a problem when Viacom was running it, or if there was, it was not as noticable. However, when Droplet was let go and Country Queen took over, I don't think Droplet had the chance to properly show CQ what to do, or what was shown was at best, the basics. Due to this, when Scrappy (and Jade) took over from CQ, they were taught/shown what CQ was given to her. This is pure speculation on my part. I don't know about uploading custom thumbnails, but I do know that Country Queen knows how to make custom thumbnails. It happened exactly one time in her tenure, for "Love Is Patient" by Emblo93.I don't know how their system works, what I would THINK is that if they know how to make a custom thumbnail and put it in their database, they can accept one made by the author, and put it in their database. But that's just me guessing. Or maybe at one point they could, but their infrastructure changed. Or maybe Country Queen knew how, but never taught Scrappy and Jade how. |
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Post by Huntress on Apr 9, 2018 14:08:36 GMT -5
I don't know how their system works, what I would THINK is that if they know how to make a custom thumbnail and put it in their database, they can accept one made by the author, and put it in their database. But that's just me guessing. Or maybe at one point they could, but their infrastructure changed. Or maybe Country Queen knew how, but never taught Scrappy and Jade how. Well, now I went and dug around URLs a bit. We don't know what their servers look like but we can sort of look in through the keyhole. In the past, all comics and custom thumbnails went into the selfsame folder on the server: images.neopets.com/ntimes/comics/en/. Thumbnails just had 'thm' added to their filename. I'm guessing it's a ginormous folder with no organization to it, but it wouldn't need much organizing anyway, new comics and thumbnails would just keep getting stacked to it as new issues get churned out. Right now, they're still using that same folder to upload new comics, thumbnails are just being pieced in from all sorts of other folders - /art/, /caption/, /games/, pet images, what have you. This used to be the case for old NT issues as well, but you'd think that chucking a new thumbnail into the general /ntimes/ folder would be less work than tracking down and linking an image from another part of the server. There should also be no reason why they couldn't make a separate custom thumbnail folder within /ntimes/ - at least one such subfolder exists, the one where Droplet kept custom illustrations to my series :'D Meaning it can't have been very complicated to create or handle. |
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Post by Kaljinyu on Apr 11, 2018 19:03:45 GMT -5
Semi-related question, what are people who usually have custom thumbnails doing? Because the Times, I don't mean this as a critique of one over the other, but you looked through the Comics section and you recognized comics. But now I'm seeing established authors and artists who once had trademark thumbnails get these generic thumbnails.
So how did thumbnails work before? Like, with a comic? Did you send it in every time? Or did the editor just know to use that thumbnail?
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Post by Twillie on Apr 11, 2018 19:20:20 GMT -5
Semi-related question, what are people who usually have custom thumbnails doing? Because the Times, I don't mean this as a critique of one over the other, but you looked through the Comics section and you recognized comics. But now I'm seeing established authors and artists who once had trademark thumbnails get these generic thumbnails. So how did thumbnails work before? Like, with a comic? Did you send it in every time? Or did the editor just know to use that thumbnail? Before, you would put the thumbnail url into the comments section of the comics submission page, and the editor would use it accordingly then. Nowadays, even if you do that, it still won't show up in the actual NT. So now people with custom thumbnails either submit via that usual method, end up with something else, and just leave it, or they have to nm the editor separately at some point and request that they change it to their preferred thumbnail which they've left on a petpage or something. |
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Post by Huntress on Apr 12, 2018 5:25:40 GMT -5
That's why I made this thread - the NTWF has always been the source of this kind of undisclosed background intel for the NT. Since there hasn't been any talk about it before, each author who's still active just ends up finding out the hard way that a thumbnail didn't upload. I got a generic thumbnail two or three times and one of them is still unchanged, can't entirely remember why; I think I just didn't bother sending yet another hey-can-you-change-this neomail to the editor time and time again.
Sending a link in the comments section does still work (well, inasmuch as they'll use precisely that link and that's how we end up with piggybacked photobucket hotlinking) - what doesn't work is the thumbnail uploading form. In the past, you'd submit the thumbnail separately with each comic and sometime around issue 700ish, that uploading system broke so the thumbnails no longer go through with the comics. Made doubly misleading because there's instructions on the nt_editor lookup saying that if your thumbnail didn't upload, it was too big, so when I first went to find out what up, I assumed that that's what the problem was.
I did neomail the editor suggesting that they put this information on the nt_editor lookup and Jade thought it was a great idea and said that she'd pass it along, except there's still no new information on the nt_editor lookup :'D I sorta suspect that the current NT suffers from things falling through the cracks because there are two people on the job.
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