Thanks to Webcomics.com member Dan Wilson for his alert in the Private Forum.
If you use a WACOM tablet on a Mac computer, you’ll want to read the details.
There are two deadlines that you should be aware of today. On October 1, Michigan law now requires some online stores to remit sales tax for purchases made by Michigan residents. Also, on Oct. 1, the liability for fraudulent credit- or debit-card charges now shifts to the merchant in the case of cards that feature an EMV chip.
Here’s what you need to know about each situation.
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Patreon CEO Jack Conte has released a message to Patreon creators about a security beach on Sept. 28 through a debug version of the site that was visible to the public.
Yesterday I learned that there was unauthorized access to a Patreon database containing user information. Our engineering team has since blocked this access and taken immediate measures to prevent future breaches. I am so sorry to our creators and their patrons for this breach of trust. The Patreon team and I are working especially hard right now to ensure the safety of the community.
There was unauthorized access to registered names, email addresses, posts, and some shipping addresses. Additionally, some billing addresses that were added prior to 2014 were also accessed. We do not store full credit card numbers on our servers and no credit card numbers were compromised. Although accessed, all passwords, social security numbers and tax form information remain safely encrypted. No specific action is required of our users, but as a precaution I recommend that all users update their passwords on Patreon.
Here are some technical details of the incident:
The unauthorized access was confirmed to have taken place on September 28th via a debug version of our website that was visible to the public. Once we identified this, we shut down the server and moved all of our non-production servers behind our firewall.
There was no unauthorized access of our production servers. The development server included a snapshot of our production database, which included encrypted data.
The development server did not have any private keys that would allow login access to any other server. We verified our authorization logs on our production servers to ensure that there was not any unauthorized access.
As a precaution, we have rotated our private keys and API keys that would allow access to third-party services that we use.
We protect our users’ passwords with a hashing scheme called ‘bcrypt’ and randomly salt each individual password. Bcrypt is non-reversible, so passwords cannot be “decrypted.” We do not store plaintext passwords anywhere.
As soon as we discovered this issue, our engineering team immediately prevented further access and is now conducting a rigorous investigation of our security systems. We are also engaging a 3rd party security firm to do a comprehensive internal security audit and will be implementing new tools and practices to ensure industry-leading security for our users and their data.
I take our creators’ and patrons’ privacy very seriously. It is our team’s mission to help creators get paid for the immeasurable value they provide to all of us, and earning your trust to provide that service in a safe and secure way is Patreon’s highest priority. Again, I sincerely apologize for this breach, and the team and I are making every effort to prevent something like this from happening in the future.
Jack Conte, CEO/Co-founder, Patreon
From Alamo City Comic Con to Baltimore Comic Con, the rumors ran wild: There might be a crackdown on Artist Alley vendors who sell unlicensed prints at New York Comic Con this weekend.
Via Rich Johnston at Bleeding Cool:
So I asked around. And while, as I understand it, there is no official “crackdown” per se, I have been told by Marvel sources that “tolerance is growing thin. Especially from companies who legally pay for the licenses to comic art from all the different companies. And from Marvel artists who sell legal prints but are being undercut by hacks who have never worked for Marvel before.”
This is an issue that Webcomics.com has kept on members’ radars since 2011, when the Disney/Marvel merger first started fueling these suspicions.
But what does this mean for selling original art or sketches that feature a character that the artist doesn’t have license to draw? Johnston:
Unlicensed prints of any company’s characters are just that… unlicensed. Which means if you are selling them, that’s an illegal act, if the copyright owner chooses to pursue it. Companies like Marvel and Disney have usually turned a blind eye to original works of art, but unlicensed prints smack of a production line. And it’s that which is getting the attention, especially when it contravenes the legal language that vendors agree to before setting up in Artists Alley…
The crackdown may or may not happen this weekend in New York, but conventional wisdom says that it’s on the horizon.
This is the final installment in the current Hot Seat series. I’ll be launching a new critique series shortly.
This one’s a Hitch it / Ditch it critique. In short: I go to participants’ sites and list something they could improve (and offer my thoughts on how they could do that), and then I talk about something they’re doing well.
As always, this is only the beginning of the discussion. Members are encouraged to share their thoughts on the matter in the comments below.
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Gumroad has recently announced a very useful expansion of their functionality: Support for variants and tiers in the products you sell.
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You don’t need a subscription to read today’s post!
This is a re-post from the Webcomics.com archive. If you’ve ever been curious about the kind of information, tutorials and advice that you’ll get as part of your subscription to Webcomics.com, this is a good example.
If you’d like to join the site, you can get a 12-month subscription for $30 — or you can get a one-month Trial for $5 … with no obligation after your 30 days expire. For less than three bucks a month, you can get a steady flow of information, tutorials and advice targeted towards your webcomic business — plus a private forum to discuss issues with other professionally minded cartoonists.
 This post has been generously submitted by Webcomics.com Member, Carrie Potter,co-creator of Juniper. |
I just went in to check on my Google Analytics and noticed something weird: A giant pile of hits from something called Semalt. For me, it appears like this:
semalt.semalt.com / referral
73.semalt.com / referral
46.semalt.com / referral
10.semalt.com / referral
16.semalt.com / referral
And on, and on, and on. I’ve gotten Web site referrals before, but not like this. Referrals from Semalt also appear to be visiting more than one page in one second or less. Bizarre. So I checked it out, and it turns out that it’s some kind of keyword research program (a bot, more or less) and it erroneously drives up your stats. It effects new visitor counts, bounce rate, pageviews, etc, and makes everything look higher than it really is.
That’s some BS, in my humble opinion. But don’t worry. Here’s a link that helps you filter out Semalt’s hits from Analytics so it will no longer affect your stats: http://www.hallaminternet.com/2014/remove-semalt-google-analytics/ Does it stop them from coming to your site altogether? No. However, they will no longer be a part of your Analytics stats, and that’s a step in the right direction.
Turns out, I’ve been getting Semalt hits for months. I don’t check my Analytics terribly often because I don’t want to catch myself obsessing about the numbers. There aren’t a ton of hits from them, but there are enough that it’s slightly skewing my numbers. Check through your traffic. Put a stop to it now.
Filtering out hits from certain sites might be old hat to pros, but for a relative newbie like me, it’s news, and I hope this helps at least raise awareness that this is a thing that can happen.
If you have a question for the Mailbag, please get in touch!
Q.: I have a question about selling on consignment. Is this a good idea? I’ve been told that it’s a low-risk option for both seller and creator — is this true?
A. Not really…
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Exhibiting next to Jim Zubkavich at Special Edition: NYC earlier this year, I gained a great pro tip that I want to share with you. It’s an inexpensive, easy way to improve your table display at conventions.
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Today we’re going to talk about a sentence that every last one of us have uttered:
I really feel like if I could get more people to see the comic they would actually like it…
There’s not a webcartoonist alive who doesn’t feel that way. Heck, I would imagine it applies to any creative profession. It’s one of our very few Universal Sentiments.
But it’s a mindset that misses an important point, and until you understand it, I think it’s going to hold you back.
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