Bi-weekly blog #19: 17,5 million views! And we broke our website. (Patreon)

Hi everyone! Time for a quick little update from the Wooden Office. We're doing fine, enjoying the nice weather, yadayada. Still playing lots of Xenoblade. Might be on its way to the 10 best games I've ever played!

Anyway, let's get to the point: we got some interesting (and funny and slightly embarrassing) stuff to share.

First off: we MIGHT very well be doing something very cool with a very cool (big!) company in the near future. I don't know how much I'm allowed to say, so excuse the vagueness. I can say that it'll mean more comics though. You'll hear more soon enough!

That brings me to the second piece of information I wanted to share: while researching the comic's performance (related to the collaboration with the mysterious/cool/big/company) we we're shocked to discover that the comics have been viewed 17,5 MILLION times on imgur alone! SEVENTEEN AND A HALF MILLION! That's as many views as there are people living in the Netherlands! Crazy! And we didn't even count the website, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Funnyjunk, Webtoon and Patreon views! If you're reading this, you're one of the 10 people among these 17,5 million who are supporting us. That's a pretty elite little club you're part of!

When you make a weekly webcomic, you're always focused on the next one. You draw, you upload, you check the comments, and it's back to work, because Wednesday is always just around the corner. You never stop to think just how many people see these things. So making a little list of all the comics was a great way to reflect for a bit. And to feel slightly proud of ourselves! Here's to 100 million!

Lastly, and somewhat related to the previous topic: two weeks ago, after the Sacred Controller Hierarchy comic, our website broke. Too many visitors. I still don't know if that's a good or a bad thing, but here's what went down:

Reddit is a tricky place to upload comics. There's a general rule that says only 10% of your posts can be self-promotional posts. Lots of moderators think uploading comics is, in fact, self-promoting. I'd say that plugging your Kickstarter or webshop is way more self-promotional than showing the art you make, but that's a tricky thing to debate. Anyway, some subreddits are pretty relaxed, like /r/comics and /r/pokemon, but /r/gaming, for instance, is VERY strict. I can't upload to /r/gaming anymore because I'd have to post around 500 "regular" treads before I'd be allowed to post another "self-promotional" comic. Other people, though, ARE allowed to post our content as much as they want. There's a catch though: sharing the imgur link of the webcomic is forbidden. The mods consider that reposting: you're not sharing the original source, you're rehosting the comic on imgur. So they only allow verified creators (me) to post comics hosted on imgur. But I can't post anymore because of the 10% self-promotional rule.

So we came up with a solution: a friend of ours asked if he could share the comic to Reddit. So we thought: "Awesome. That way it won't be self-promotional!". He would have to use the original (woodenplankstudios.com) link though. We figured that wouldn't do too much harm because heck, who even likes these comics anyway, right?

Well, turns out hosting a top post on /r/gaming generates A LOT more traffic than we thought. 200,000 views later and our server blew up. www.woodenplankstudios.com was offline for a whole night. So we've learned our lesson and as soon as possible, we're upgrading our hosting so we can accommodate a bit more traffic!

That's the past two weeks in a short summary. Hope to see you back soon!

-Abel