


Postby Mercury Hat on Wed Jan 18, 2006 2:47 pm

We've been needing a new one o' these since the switch over so here we go. It's mostly copied/pasted straight from the old one, but it's been updated. If you don't read through this and ask a question which is answered here, you probably will be yelled at. I know this is long, but please look through it to see if your question has been answered already.

How to ask for help.
  1. Read the FAQ and Wiki Tutorials before asking for help.
  2. Make sure you have read the FAQ and Wiki Tutorials properly and have not just skimmed over it.
  3. State your problem clearly and concisely, with as much detail as possible.
  4. List down the steps you have done so far.
  5. ALWAYS include your Keenspace URL. Even if you don't have a Keenspace site yet but have signed up for an account, include the signup name.
  6. Sometimes it helps to state what browser, operating systems, firewalls etc. you are using.
  7. Be polite.

Here's an example of a good post:

I followed the FAQ and Guides, and have managed to set up my Keenspace site.

Here's what I did:

1) I uploaded my images to /workspace/images/ folder
2) Uploaded the new HTML files to workspace/webpages
3) Uploaded my dailytemplate and indextemplate to /workspace
4) Triggered a regular manual update

However, some of the images on my site ( http://longestsojourn.keenspace.com ) do not appear to be showing up.

I've checked the HTML code for the site, they appear to be correct. Here's an example of the code I used:

Code: Select all
<img src="banner.jpg">

I'm currently using Mozilla as my browser, running on Windows XP.

Any help would be appreciated.

A bad example:

I know I did everything right but images broke. Help plz.

Remember, the better you present your problem, the faster we can solve it.

Happy Webcomicking!

The Most Common Questions
For other questions, see bottom of thread

Q: Help! I've lost my password!
Q: I've activated my account but I'm still not getting my username/password!

A: If you still have the email you signed up with, you can request another on here:
http://siteadmin.comicgenesis.com:8080/ ... ssword.cgi

If you've lost your email address, though, you will have to contact the Kisai or Kelly (The Admins) and let them know. Make sure you have proof of identity when you do so they knows you really are the person who owns the account.

Also check and make sure your email software isn't filtering your ComicGenesis mail out Hotmail seems to be filtering CGen mail out.

Q: Help! I've just gotten my website and don't know where to begin!
A: There is a step-by-step guide here.

Q: I can't get into siteadmin!
A: Okay, the new siteadmin just has an extra step the old one didn't. You need to have a forum login first and, making sure you haven't logged out of the forum, you'll be able to get in with no problems. Put in your comic's username and password where provided and add it to your account. There you have it! You'll be able to upload, update, and do all kinds of neat things from here.

Q: My Images/links aren't working/don't work on my archive pages!
A: Check your code. If you've linked to an image or page as this:
Code: Select all
<img src="images/banner.jpg" /> or <a href="cast.html">
these will work fine on pages which are not in a subfolder. Your archive pages, however, appear in the /d/ folder so in order to reference your images and links correctly, they must be as such:
Code: Select all
<img src="/images/banner.jpg" /> and <a href="/cast.html">

Q: Where is SiteAdmin? I can't log on to it!?
A: SiteAdmin is located at http://siteadmin.comicgenesis.com . <strike>Should you need it, the old siteadmin is at http://siteadmin.comicgenesis.com:8080/ . </strike> The old siteadmin is deprecated and you should be using the new one to do all your comic needs.

Q: Where's an explanation of the update offset?
A: There's one right here.

Q: I can't add another Author in the control panel in SiteAdmin! It keeps logging me out instead!
A: This feature is currently broken. You cannot add an additional author until Kisai or Kelly fixes it.

Q: Does ComicGenesis support PHP, CGI, SSI?
A: No. Kisai says: ComicGenesis is not for testing out your php scripts, and what has happened from time to time is that I've updated php for one of the php maintenance systems and it's made php temporaily available on some sites.

All the *.comicgenesis.com only sites all run under the same apache section which is more memory efficient, but the downside is that it's theoretically possible for someone to tamper with each others sites.

FTP is much the same way, the DB controls on it restrict you to your own site.

If it wasn't for these two systems, the amount of resources required to have as many sites available would be outlandish.

PHP officially is not supported. Only the official Autokeen or any future varient rolled will be supported. No PHP script will work on a CG site without Kisai enabling it, and Kisai will not enable PHP for sites for users who aren't programmers. Assume no PHP widgets will be allowed other than what is provided already.

No third party CMS or forum software will be supported. Since most of these require a significant investment in system resources and have the potential to ruin everyone's day if hacked, the answer is no.

Q: Can I get a forum for webcomic from ComicGenesis Forums?
A: Absolutely! Just go to the message board request forum and ask away.

Q: I've having issues with ComicGenesis's anti-hotlinking system (and other related issues)
Kisai says:

1. Why has the anti-hotlinking been kicked up a notch?
a) People hotlinking to the banners is causing their statistics to be quite wrong. The "hits" "visits" and "referrers" was being inflated, when nobody was even visiting the site, just seeing the banner. Traditionally you should require anyone linking to your site to copy the banner to their site, and link back to you. If this is too difficult for someone to figure out, then it won't be of any significant benefit to you anyway.

2. Why do I have to go through the trouble of using the guide banners, when it's faster for me to link to the banner itself?
a) By creating one link for everyone, you can update the banner at anytime without having to go back to all the places you put your banner, or who have copied the code to your banner and have them update it.

3. Isn't this the kind of crap that geocities pulls?
a) sort of. Unlike Geocities this isn't a blanket ban on hotlinking (geocities implemented bandwidth caps to stop that). This was done originally to stop people from using keenspace as a dumpsite for the images they use on their journals, forums, etc. For lack of any other content.
b) This also stops "page scrapers" from downloading the sites and showing the content elsewhere.

4. All I see are red-x's (IE) or blank space where the images are!
a) People running Norton Internet Security or Norton Firewall need to turn off privacy settings that strip out the referrer. This is an additional reason why the anti-hotlinking has been uped a bit, as without the referrer information, you don't know where/how people are visiting your site.
b) the system shows error 410, gone when an attempt to download the image directly is done.

5. I don't like this!
a) I'll make an exception for VALID hotlinking (ie, if it's on another keenspace/keenspot site showing our advertising) otherwise I'd advise purchasing a domain.

6. Purchasing a domain?
a)I'll turn the anti-hotlinking off if you have a domain and want it off, but the domain has to either be "pointed to comicgenesis" or you have a subdomain that "is" the comicgenesis comic. (which your nameserver configuration has to have a A entry for the subdomain pointing to our server)

May 1 2008:
Kisai says: Due to the amount of effort required to install and maintain a domain name on the site (once added, can't be removed without difficulty) we are no longer proactively enabling third party domain names. Most if not all domain registries allow you to forward your domain to another. Please use this feature until you have established your comic and we can then enable it.

Q: HELP! I've lost my indextemplate.html and/or dailytemplate.html! Where can I get them back?
Q: I just got a new account but there is no indextemplate.html or dailytemplate.html files in the /workspace folder! What do I do?

A: If you've just gotten your account and find the files missing, this is a server-side bug and not your fault. However, you can fix this yourself, so don't panic.
If you've lost the files, well, at least you've learnt the lesson: Always make backups. But because these things happen, here's the code you need to make a new indextemplate.html or dailytemplate.html:

indextemplate.html code
Code: Select all
<html lang="en" xml:lang="en"
<head><title>***comic_name*** - ***todays_date***</title>
charset=iso-8859-1" />
<div class="keen_ad" style="display:inline;">
<div class="main">
<h2>by ***author***</h2>
<br />
***first_day*** ***previous_day*** ***next_day*** ***last_day***
<br />
***comic_name*** is hosted on <a href="http://www.comicgenesis.com">ComicGenesis</a>, a free webhosting and site automation service for webcomics.

dailytemplate.html code
Code: Select all

<html lang="en" xml:lang="en"
charset=iso-8859-1" />
<div class="main">
<br />
<br />

Copy and paste the code into a text editor. Save the files as indextemplate.html and dailytemplate.html respectively.
You should then upload them via FTP to your /workspace folder. Note that is is just the working directory /workspace, and NOT /workspace/webpages.

Q: I can't log into the WIki, it keeps saying username not found. What's the deal?
A: If you have an underscore (_) in your name, you will not be able to log into the wiki because it processes underscores as spaces. In order to fix this, you can either sign up for a new account or, more easily, you can PM me and ask me to change your name for you.

Important ComicGenesis Facilities and Links

You can modify your settings and other information here. You also manage your banners from here.

Lost and New Password
You can generate new and customisable passwords here which will then have to activated by email
http://siteadmin.comicgenesis.com:8080/ ... ssword.cgi

Check Status
You can check the status of your signup, comic or password here
http://siteadmin.keenspace.com:8080/cgi ... status.cgi

Lost Forum Password Facility
To recover your lost forum password
http://siteadmin.keenspace.com:8080/cgi ... ssword.cgi

A new facility for FTP transfers.

You can check the update status of your website here. The last line will show you, down to second, the time your site last updated
An example for sitename 'thejaded'

ComicGenesis Webalizer Logs
The fun facility where you get to pore over your data on how many hits and visits your site gets per day, month, hour, from where, with what search strings and everything else you wanted to know about your readers.

When logged into the new siteadmin, you have the option of reading your logs straight through there.

Webalizer is being phased out on comicgenesis due to it being inaccurate when comics are served from load balanced servers. Depending on what we choose to do in the future, you may want to use google analytics or just use a simple third party stat tracker.

Atrus's Taglossary
An excellent and thorough listing of ComicGenesis Tags, their functions and how to use them

The Guide
Where all the comics are listed
Note the guide is currently being deprecated in favor of using the wiki instead. http://cgwiki.comicgenesis.com/index.php . You can add your own comic, description, and everything yourself. Your forum login is the same as the one for the wiki.

Update Offset FAQ
http://www.reasonedcognition.com/offset ... ation.html


Frequently Asked Questions

Color codes:
Unanswered Questions
Answered Questions
Uncertain Answers (I haven't checked it out myself)

Q: How do I log into my ComicGenesis account?
A: You log in from http://siteadmin.comicgenesis.com
If you haven't done so already, you'll need to have a forum login. Without logging out of the forum, go to siteadmin and you should be logged in there as well. Add in your username and password where provided but remember that the username and passwords are case sensitive, which means 'Phalanx' isn't the same as 'phalanx'.

Q: How/When do I get my ComicGenesis username/password?
A: An indeterminate period of time after you've registered, you should get a confirmation email. You should go to the link provided and enter the code included in the email where it says so. Then sit back and and wait for CGen to send you the username/password. This may take the better part of a day/a few days so be patient! Whatever you do please don't post yet another mail asking why it hasn't arrived instantly. The forum will hate you for it.

Within 48 hours unless your ISP is on the banned list, in which case, you won't receive the first email.

Q: I'm not getting my confirmation/username/password emails!
A: Check that your mailbox has not filtered the mail out. You can also check the status of your password here


Kisai says: The first email is sent within 1 hour, subject to internet delivery times. If you authorize it, you may receive the next email in one or two days. If you do not receive an email by the end of 14 days, it's been deleted.

Q: I keep trying to log into the old SiteAdmin. It accepts my password, but it just redirects me to the login page again! What's going on?
A: This is a sporadic problem that crops up from time to time. It's usually a problem with your browser and DOES also happen to browsers which have passed the cookie write test included in the login page. I've found sometimes that closing all windows and opening a new one just for login, as daft as that sound, generally works.

How do you know that you have this problem and have not just input your password incorrectly? Simple. If the password is incorrect, CGen will tell you so on the TRY AGAIN login page. If you're getting a plain page with no explanations, you've been hit.

Q: I keep trying to log into the new Siteadmin and I keep getting the same page over and over. What's the deal?
A: Logout of the forums completely, log back into the forums. Then login to Siteadmin exactly the same way you logged into the forums. Please note that the first letter is always capitalized, regardless of the case of the other letters.
If your id is: FUNstuf123, your siteadmin login is FUNstuf123
If your id is: funstuff123, your siteadmin login is Funstuff123

Q: What are ComicGenesis tags for??
A: ComicGenesis tags are placeholders for information and/or pieces of code. They are usually contained within rows of triple asterisks (stars) like so: '***comic name***'. The tags are usually used to replace information that is repeated many many times, but is subject to change from time to time. This is to save time and effort so should any change occur on the site's part, there's no need to look for every occurrence of that particular bit of information and manually recode it. Please note that CGentags only work for the templates in the /workspace folder.

Q: How do I use the ComicGenesis tags??
A: Just insert the tags where you would normally insert the code. This is an example just to demonstrate. Don't take it literally, please:
Let's say that my comic is called Jaded, and my author name is Phalanx. On every page of the website, naturally there would be a header saying like: 'Jaded, By Phalanx'. Using CGentags, I'd code it in html this way-
<h1>***comic_name*** By ***author***</h1>
Autokeen will read this and output in an html file:
<h1>Jaded, by Phalanx</h1>
Since my comic name is recorded to be 'Jaded' and by authorname is 'Phalanx'.
But what if I decide the title should be 'The Jaded' instead of just 'Jaded'? All I have to do is change the comic_name value (I think it's from SiteAdmin) and request for a full update. Then, voila! Every page will have been updated with the correct header: ('The Jaded, By Phalanx') without me having to search through every page and changing every occurrence of 'Jaded' with 'The Jaded'.
(Updated: I hope this explains it clearly enough. Thanks to Das Charlotte, Yeas and all the others who helped out.)

Q: What does ***this tag*** do??
A: See the link to the tagtorial above.

Q: Help! My tags aren't working!
A: Make sure you haven't uploaded a page straight to /public_html. If you do, then the page will not be processed and the tags won't get replaced. Check spelling, as well. Many people put in ***todays_comic*** instead of the proper ***todays_comics*** or ***calender*** when they mean ***calendar***.

If your tags seem right, but nothing is appearing in the public_html version, check the filenames and their extensions. Comics with the wrong filenames will not show up and the tags will be inserted as size 0 (And therefore invisible).

Q: How do I update manually?
A: There's an option to do that via SiteAdmin. Log in to SiteAdmin, and select the Manual Update option. Don't forget to upload all your comics into the workspace/comics folder before you do this. There are 3 kinds of updates available: 1)Regular 2)Index page only 3)Full Update. "Regular" is index and an archive page, "Index" is index.html, "Full" is everything. Pick the one that best suits your needs. Naturally, you pick 'Full' for the first time. Once this is done, the little queue bar at the bottom should will tell you if your update's gone through or not.

Be advised, though, that full updates are very taxing on the server. Only use a full update if you need updates for all of your pages.

When you turn comes, AutoKeen will update everything from the templates (and searches for anything new, and update that too.)
(Thanks to Das Charlotte and the others for the help here)

Q: How do I update automatically??
A: Upload all your comics (dated correctly on the dates you want to update) into the /workspace/comics folder. For example, if today is 2006-01-18, and you want to update your comic on 2006-01-20, but you won't have access to a computer at that time, then upload the comic as 20060120.jpg and on the 20 th, AutoKeen will update it for you.
(Thanks to Recon Dye)

Q: How do I 'bundle' text in comic pages??
A: See here for the answer

For more versatility, see also ***todays_notes***.

Q: Do I have to include the 'This site is hosted by ComicGenesis' link on my site? Can I change how it looks? What about the ads?
A: As CGen is providing the service for free, the least a Genner can do is acknowledge it and provide a link to their site. So yes, you have to. However, I don't think they'll mind you changing the way it looks as long as you keep the meaning of the message the same, that is, 1)The service is provided by ComicGenesis 2)It's free 3)It's for webcomic artists 4)There is a link to http://www.comicgenesis.com

Likewise the advertisement tag must be at the top of your page (above the fold), prominently displayed. This means no hiding it anywhere on your page. Putting ads on your page is your way of paying for the webspace. Additional Comicgenesis provided ads put on your site may enable other features soon.

Q: How do I replace the ***next_comic***, ***first_comic*** tags etc with buttons?
A: See tagtorial linked above.

Q: My comic isn't showing up in the Guide! What can I do?
A: If your comic doesn't appear in the guide, it probably hasn't generated any hits yet. The alphabetic lists have two versions, one "with comics and newer than 30 days" and "all comics regardless of age and content" New comics will not show up in the former untill they have 1 comic and the site was manually or automatically updated.
(Cheers, Kisai!)

Q: How can I upload a banner/newsbox/etc?
A: Read this here.

Q: How do I get a drawing or one of those round things on the front page?
A: The round things are pogs and the drawings are of Genchan.

That's it for the FAQ, and good luck with your webomic!

Got a question? Post it here and I'll include it in the FAQ!

Found a mistake? Know the answer to one of the questions? Post it here and I'll update/change the info.


Still confused? Here are links to more Keenspace and Web help:


The Gear

The Wiki Tutorials (see also the category for tutorials on that page)

The Dark Pages

FTP Planet


How Not To Run A Comic


Thanks to the admins (Kelly and Kisai) and all the regular posters of the Help forum: Kisai (We love our Catgirl Admin!), Atrus, Kelly (aka STrRedWolf, the other admin), Ping (who wrote 90% of this post) and all the other who helped with the compilation of this FAQ.
If you did not find the answer to your question in here, please use the Search function first. If, after all your efforts, you have not found the answer to your question, then you may post a thread about it.

Last edited by Kisai March 10th, 2009 7:40 AM
User avatar
Mercury Hat
Iron Lady (ForumAdmin)
Iron Lady (ForumAdmin)
Posts: 5608
Joined: Sat Jan 24, 2004 1:57 pm
Location: Hello city.


Return to Help Center

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 4 guests