yawr
yet another webcomic reader 

Notes For Comics Creators

  1. Please don't sue me. :) It's a waste of time anyway - if you don't want your comic to be included, just send me a mail and I'll remove it.
  2. I cannot be held responsible for plugins created by users. If somebody else is distributing a plugin of your comic, that's their fault, not mine.
  3. You're stealing my bandwidth! - YAWR is a niche product. It's targetted largely at people trying to follow more than fifty comics - anybody else would probably be happy with bookmarks. As such, it's unlikely to have a noticable impact on your server load.
  4. You're stealing my ad revenue! - I'm not advertising this program publicly. Somebody who uses it is thus probably tech-savvy enough to know about AdBlock and ad revenue, so if they're using YAWR, they're making a conscious decision to ignore ads. Such a person would very likely have been blocking or ignoring ads anyway.
  5. I've reluctantly implemented referrer faking support to be able to support plugins on sites like Comicgenesis. If you want a foolproof way to block my client, just filter out all requests with a user-agent containing "D/tools". I implemented referrer faking because some sites block any sort of hotlinking, leaving programs like mine collateral. I will never implement user-agent faking.
  6. Isn't all of this illegal? - I don't believe so. Ultimately, your server is providing the client with the images. The key question is if referrer checking can be considered an "effective protection"; I don't believe any protection that relies on a single line in the HTTP headers being set correctly by the client can possibly be considered effective. It's the equivalent of a door guard asking people "Hey, do you have permission to go in here? ", letting in anybody who answers in the positive. And it's moot anyway - don't like it, I'll gladly remove your plugin.
  7. You evil person are making a profit off my hard work! - As you'll note, there are no ads anywhere on these pages. YAWR itself is completely open-source and distributed under the terms of the GPL.
  8. Can't you include my ads? - Despite supporting HTTP, YAWR is not a full web browser. More importantly, it has zero support for Javascript or Flash. This means that I could at best support simple, static-image-based ads and to do that, I'd have to essentially use referrer faking on the advertisement companies, which they might count as fraud and take it as a reason to terminate your agreement. So, no.
  9. Is there any way you can at least provide a link to my home-, store or donations page? - That I can do. Just drop me a mail with the links you want and I'll insert them in the plugin so that they're displayed (as buttons) above your images.