yawr
yet another webcomic reader
Notes For Comics Creators
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.