Archive for the 'FAQ' Category

Just a reminder: Please read the FAQ before posting comments.

Cidu Bill on Jan 29th 2011

(It’s here)

Especially the part about personal attacks on other visitors.

Thank you.

Filed in Bill Bickel, CIDU, FAQ | 21 responses so far

This shouldn’t need to be said, but…

Cidu Bill on Jun 3rd 2010

If you ever feel inclined to post a comment that you know is going to get deleted… please don’t. It’s disrespectful to everybody else here, and it wastes my time. If you’re uncertain, please read the FAQ.

Filed in Bill Bickel, CIDU, FAQ | 15 responses so far

Mailing Address

Cidu Bill on Feb 11th 2010

Just a reminder that it’s been almost 2 years since I stopped using the cidumay2004@yahoo.com e-mail address. For a while I was still checking that mailbox regularly. Then not-so-regularly. I checked it again this afternoon after about 6 months, and found a bunch of submissions, many with expired links.

Please note the new address, which is a gmail address using the full name of this site (and how annoying is it to have to go through these verbal gymnastics in order to outsmart the spambots?).

As long as I’ve got your attention, when you’re submitting a comic, it would be most helpful if you both give me a link to it, and attach it — because sometimes attachments don’t survive the trip, and sometimes links don’t work. Just for the record, if you send me a link that contains rbma.com, it will not work.

And if you’re new here, please glance at the FAQ before sending anything or responding to a post.

Filed in Bill Bickel, CIDU, FAQ | 7 responses so far

Before You Post…

Cidu Bill on Dec 16th 2009

If you’re new to this site, please glance at the FAQ before posting anything. Also, a reminder for everybody: If you submit a comment and it doesn’t show up immediately, don’t bother to repost: something probably red-flagged the comment for moderation — more than two external links, a word that WordPress associates with spam, some factor that nobody’s ever been able to identify — and you won’t have any more luck with the repost. I’ll probably find and rescue the comment within an hour or two.

Filed in Bill Bickel, CIDU, FAQ | 6 responses so far

If you’re new to CIDU…

Cidu Bill on Oct 16th 2009

Welcome.

But please glance at the FAQ before commenting. I don’t hold comments for moderation. I don’t require anybody to register. I don’t care whether the e-mail address you enter is genuine (one person uses notmyrealaddress.com). All I ask is that people respect the house rules.

Filed in Bill Bickel, CIDU, FAQ | 24 responses so far

It’s Called a FAQ

Cidu Bill on May 12th 2009

I’m sort of accustomed to bloggers who come across the CIDU site and then write about how they don’t understand what it is and therefore I and everybody who posts here are poopyheads.

I was particularly amused today when somebody called to my attention a blogger who couldn’t figure out what an Arlo was, tried all manner of acronyms, even Googled the word.

Filed in Arlo Page, Bill Bickel, CIDU, FAQ, comics | 18 responses so far

I wish I didn’t have to say this again, but…

Cidu Bill on Mar 20th 2008

…if you have nothing more productive to contribute than “I hate this comic strip” or that one or more of the visitors to this site is stupid, please take your comments elsewhere. Deleting inappropriate comments is so much more work for me than simply blacklisting the person who makes them, and I have a strong preference for the easy approach.

This isn’t to say there’s anything wrong with the occasional rant or personal disagreements that get a bit out of hand — but if “I hate this strip and the guy who writes it should die of a terrible disease” is all you ever have to say, then you’re on the wrong site.

There’s a FAQ. If in doubt, please read it.

Filed in Bill Bickel, CIDU, FAQ | No responses yet

CIDU’s and Don’ts: The FAQ

Cidu Bill on Jan 1st 2008

We mostly discuss individual daily comics here. This is not a place for people to say “I hate this comic strip and its artist should never be allowed to work in this business again.” The CIDU page is a place for people who love comics, and the artists deserve respect. In the old format, when I chose which comments ended up on the page, it was easy for me to control this. Now I have to trust visitors to accept the rules.

Also: Whether a particular person understands a particular comic can sometimes be incredibly random. People send me an average of 2 or 3 comics a day, and I give them explanations to virtually all of them: These might seem glaringly obvious to me; and then I might come across a comic I simply won’t get (and I’ll put on the page), which will be glaringly obvious to everybody else. Sometimes when this happens, I get a comment such as “Hey, are you stupid or something?”

My response is generally along the lines of “No, I just didn’t get this particular comic. Leave and don’t come back.” I really hate to ban anybody, but I have no use for anybody who will come into my (virtual) home to insult me.

Actually, I’m not keen on my houseguests insulting one another either.

If you post a message that contains more than one link, it won’t appear until after I’ve okayed it — which generally happens very quickly, since I pretty much live online. The purpose of this, of course, is to keep spam from taking over the site.

For those of you who are very new here, or are new to the new format, we’ve moved a bit beyond just explaining comics: We also have special sections for the Arlo Page (comics you don’t want to explain to the kids) and the related Arlo Award (comics that appeared in mainstream newspaper syndication which obviously slipped by the censors — this being one of the more blatant examples).

By the way, the Arlo Page is named after Arlo Guthrie. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

Other special categories we have here are the Ewww Files (fairly self-explanatory), Comics That Made Us Laugh Out Loud (a weekly, noon-Monday hall of fame for comics we really, really got a kick out of) , and the ChadWatch. ChadWatch are comics that attempt to mine humor from the 2000 presidential elections, usually by making references to hanging chads. I began this section back in December of 2000 in order to try to pinpoint the very last chad-related gag (because seriously, the joke was well past played out by the time Bush took office). I never suspected that almost 8 years later, we’d still be collecting them.

Sometimes we’ll notice two comic strips using a nearly-identical gag on the same day for no apparent reason. When that happens I’ll post them both, noting the synchronicity. Just because. These rarely call out for explanation.

The site is updated with a new CIDU every day at 12:02AM Eastern Time — except for the two weeks or so following “spring forward” and “fall back,” when the server sometimes thinks it’s an hour earlier than it really is (though it’s a mystery why the same thing happens in the spring and the fall), and the update goes live an hour late.

Additional updates generally show up throughout the day, but the 12:02am update happens without exception.

We don’t encourage artists to explain their own comics, because they’ve already had their chance to make us understand. Also, it’s more fun this way.

Finally, if you have anything to send me — a comic you don’t understand, an Arlo or ChadWatch candidate, a suggestion, whatever — please e-mail me at comicsidontunderstand at gmail.com.

When you’re submitting a comic, it would be most helpful if you both give me a link to it, and attach it — because sometimes attachments don’t survive the trip, and sometimes links don’t work. Just for the record, if you send me a link that contains rbma.com, it will not work.

Thanks to Blinky the Wonder Wombat for providing a better definition for the Arlo Page than I’d been offering

Filed in Arlo Page, Bill Bickel, CIDU, ChadWatch, Ewww, FAQ, comics that made us laugh out loud, lol, synchronicity | 12 responses so far