Little support for Webcomics

  • If you’re running a webcomic with the Webcomic plug-in and are hoping to integrate Patreon into it, it’s not there yet. While you can Patreon-lock posts, it does not lock the associated image (as Webcomic images aren’t part of “content”), so you will have to manually lock and unlock that image. The developer is considering adding functionality to cover this, but right now it’s not there.

    What’s more, when I do lock the webcomic image, the loading time on the site is EGREGIOUS. It takes so long on a high speed connection to load the comic behind the “Unlock for $1” overlay that I can’t imagine how bad it would be for someone on the other side of the world with poor connection. We’re talking like 10 seconds just to get the main page to load, and it’s about 1-2 seconds without that turned on. For a webcomic, speed is make-or-break and this is absolutely Break.

    Documentation is extremely sparse and almost unusable. It’s just an overview of the features with no explanation of how to use them. Are there shortcodes? Functions? Hooks? I have no idea.

    Portions of the plugin are poorly labeled (What’s a Patreon Site Sidebar Widget vs a Patreon Author Sidebar Widget? I can’t tell.) and there are missing functionalities that I would expect, such as a shortcode for a Patreon button and support for Custom Post Types in the “append patreon button to posts” setting.

    As others have noted, the review nag is frustrating and never goes away. You want my brutally honest opinions? Here you go. This plugin falls completely short of its goals and I am incredibly disappointed that I spent money on it.

    Overall, I paid a bunch of money for a pro plugin that does nothing of what I need for the site I’m building. I can only hope it will get better in time. For now, I’m sorely disappointed.

    • This topic was modified 6 years, 6 months ago by pixelprism.
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  • Plugin Author CodeBard

    (@codebard)

    Sorry to hear that you had trouble in getting full performance from your installation.

    But it seems to me you are confusing the official plugin (this one) with Patron Plugin Pro and Patreon Button & Widgets plugin it includes. For, the widgets belong to that plugin.

    Pro plugin is documented very well, and links to documentation is included in the files you have got with your package – which were strongly recommended to be read, at least the quickstart one.

    Image locking feature is a quite advanced feature in that, this plugin doesnt just put an ugly placeholder image in place of your images like many solutions do. It instead takes the original image, applies well designed filters to it, and obscures the image without breaking the image’s original art and visage.

    This, requires sufficient server resources. If you are on a low end hosting, or your server is overloaded, indeed it may cause images to come out slower, at least in the first installation. After generated placeholder images are cached it should not be problem.

    You are spot on with the Webcomic compatibility – there are numerous webcomic plugins which do not properly utilize the_content filter, hence they require additional functions in other plugins to lock them. This is something we are aware of, and we possibly will look into it for the upcoming releases.

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