Bill Cox

This goes back to my inability to give direction to our exhibitors because we were both programming and trying to organize this first show. In order to drive interest in what's in your booth, or whom you have doing commissions, you have to do your own PR, and share that PR with me to share it for you. I can tell you that those that did some advance promotion did incredibly well compared to their peers. And everyone by and large did well as an Exhibitor.

Not really, many in-person Cons have an auction component - whether strictly for charity or to benefit the show. It would certainly not be the main focus of what we do, but could have a place.

Logistics and liabilities but something that we considered for this and future shows. They auctioned off a Paolo Rivera piece in his panel and it went fine. He worked on a Wonder Woman artwork in pencil during the panel, and based on the auction end price knew how detailed to make the finished piece. I thought it was a great way to do it.

Hi Nelson, There are a lot of options on the table for certain for future events. Since we will probably limit this to weekends I can't see an entire day being devoted to premium only but we can figure out something for sure. If we had more engagement from our Exhibitors ahead of time to promote what was for sale you'd have a better idea what booths you wanted to see first, etc. Since we provide a booth preview, it would be good if we gave premium users the ability to bookmark their favorite booths in advance so they can see them easily in searches, and browse just their artwork faster when the show opens to premium members. Your second idea would mean that everyone would have to be premium and that would limit things enough some exhibitors would not exhibit. There has to be a happy medium between free and premium, with the advantage going to premium members always in a major way.

Nothing sounded like criticism to me at all. We're going to take a few days to decompress and relax and start thinking about what's next. The more ideas, complaints and concepts thrown out the better because it will help us shape the next experience. I'm not active here but I've been following this thread since it started and will take into account any suggestions and ideas that are brought up here. Allred's panel was a lot of fun for me as well. I had never met him before and getting to chat with him in the green room prior to his panel and a few days prior when we tested his mic with Simon was honestly one of the highlights of the show for me.

I think they will be back too, but not with the same attendance levels being allowed, vaccine or not. Lower attendance figures means fewer sellers, sellers bringing less, etc. Online events will never replace in person ones. I think we'll see efforts on the art side of things to congregate more at select cons that have an art focus, and less at cons that don't. Lake Como, Heroes, Baltimore, Comic Art Con, Comic Art Expo, LA Show, etc.

One of the things we know we need it a Booth Feed. For updates on Flash Sales, Commissions in progress or completed, etc. Heck, pics of you giving the thumbs up when you sold/bought something. Those things will help this feel more like an Event and keep us all engaged. Still not the same as a con experience, but a social one nonetheless.

2) I have gotten similar feedback. My issue is trying to keep the times fair for everyone globally. We could do that on a Friday night, but everyone in Europe would be at a disadvantage.Try 6pm EST so it's around midnight in Europe, then everyone on the West Coast is still at work. My goal is to ensure everyone coming has a chance to get exactly what they want without being shut out, so timing is really important. 3) I do like this idea. Shows interest. Might be fun to be able to order the search by "Most Emailed".

The issue there is that Exhibitors will move things to SOLD just to cycle their artwork even when it didn't sell, just to keep things fresh. You know as well as I do they'd mark something sold just to put the same piece back up there. I've heard from many many sellers that items sold in their Classifieds as a result of having a booth, or sales that happened with Dealers on their sites because they had a booth. I think having a limit was the right approach. While we'll consider plenty of things for the next one that's my least favorite idea. I'd much prefer to create a way to have a list of price reduced items on day two (scheduled), and create other sales opportunities. Who knows? But I thank everyone for checking it out and giving me tons of feedback to digest via email, here and socially. I've got days of research ahead of me!

I think you're wrong there, Malvin. When Cons come back I don't see them being the same at all. For the next year or two (or forever) most will be limited by 50% occupancy or worse, which means many Sellers aren't going to take the time and spend the money to go to all shows if the buyers are not there, and the buyers wont attend because the sellers wont be there. Artists are finding it easier to sell online in many different ways and don't want to expose themselves to health risks when they can make just as much money from home. I love in-person Cons, but I simply don't see things getting back to normal anytime soon, and whatever normal will be in a year or two wont be anything like we were accustomed to.

I chose to parse out sellers from the feed if their results would be duplicated. CC, CL, TDArts, ComicInkKing, and many others. Ditto on keywords in the For Sale field, like ON HOLD, SOLD, NFS, ebay.com, etc etc etc.

That's my point regarding FB as being one of the two biggest reasons you've seen change. A view is a passing glance on someone's timeline and comment is a random millisecond consideration of a "thumbs up". And a few hours later your post is lost in the trashbin that is everything in FB's past. But it's a lot of fun getting those FB tingles telling you your post is getting liked the first 24 hours. You think about all the kids who will eventually take over our hobby who thrive in that arena and it doesn't seem far fetched that places like this board or CAF don't really stand a chance or maintaining thriving communities.

The only time CAF had a decline was a few years back when the CAF site was cloned for EU related comic art. Certain countries no longer come to CAF like they used to. Some gallery owners closed their galleries to move under their umbrella. It was disappointing but there wasn't anything that could be done about it. Traffic has been the same for over two years and we still get over 40 new registrations every day. The same amount of art is posted every day. And I do think FB is the other main culprit. People spend a lot of their available time on the internet there, so it leaves less time to hang out on CAF. But FB is also one of the single biggest referrers to the site after Google, so it's a blessing and a curse at the same time.

That is because the site isn't running on HTTPS. You can switch your browser to use HTTPS like you have done, but then ANY item on the page not also running on HTTPS is considered suspect. When we make the switch on the site to be 100% HTTPS you wont see that. The only thing on CAF we run through HTTPS today is the login for security purposes.

That's my philosophy, but as most people know I've also never entertained an "everyone has to pay" philosophy. We're pretty close to 1 million artworks on CAF today. Anything that would cause that number to drop by 10-33% isn't worth it. I built CAF because I wanted to see the hidden gems in a person's collection, the guys with only 10 con sketches, etc. The Lowry was great in it's day, but limiting with only 5 images allowed. I don't want people to have to pick and choose what they show or don't. About the only thing I've ever considered was limiting the number of active artworks in a gallery, but it would still be a high number like 50 or 100, and even then I highly doubt I'd ever really consider doing it. This issue pops up a lot, and I do appreciate everyone's concern about CAF and even more that they care about it as much as I do. To clear up a misunderstood comment in another thread - CAF is my full time job. It is not a hobby and hasn't been for over 10 years. CAF will be 15 years old in Feb, and it really has been a blessing to be a part of it. Like all of you I grew up on comics and the art they contained fueled most things in my life (D&D and my TRS-80 coming in a close 2nd and 3rd in importance). I would never have thought I'd be able to be a part of comics and art in a such a meaningful way to so many. I will tell you all that if I was ever in trouble there would be a bat signal on CAF and I'd let everyone know that I needed some support. I've been self employed for over 20 years and every year gets more challenging than the last, but good things tend to come from challenges so I've never been upset when things are not always perfect.

If you're blocked from all those resources this is not a CAF issue. It's a firewall issue from our end, ie we blocked you because someone at your IP (or once had your IP) was doing something wrong so you're prevented from accessing anything on our network, or conversely, your ISP and wifi blocked you all on it's own for it's own reasons. But it isn't a CAF issue and certainly isn't a malware issue. If CAF had malware anywhere on the site every browser on the planet would not allow anyone to visit the website. You can email me privately again and we can see if your wifi IP is being blocked.

So many posts here that I could reply to but this seems like the best place to start. I'll get back to Nico's google comments and SquareChaos' reply after addressing a few other things that were brought up... First, we scraped sites 14 years ago when CAF launched, so we did do this same approach early on. We abandoned it for several reasons like getting push back from site owners that we were scraping their site for content, but also the fact that the results were not in real time. As a collector I wanted something better. We abandoned that scraping approach on CAF when we decided to help comic art dealers build better sites, which in turn allowed us to build our own central inventory of dealer art for sale data that updated in real time. If you've been around long enough I'm sure you remember when sites like Spencer Beck's were the norm, and every collector who had a website used geocities for free hosting. Better dealer sites built on the robust and expensive network that we created and maintain, along with a centralized art for sale search on CAF, changed the hobby in many positive ways. Free gallery space gave CAF it's start and truly does make it continue to stand out today, but commerce backed by the work we did to make art for sale more accessible on many levels from dealers, collectors and other marketplaces and auction houses continues to be just as important. There was also something said about us resting on our rears and not doing anything new on CAF in years which is absurd. We are working on CAF every day. Sometimes that work can be mundane like answering support emails, optimizing searches, assisting dealers on current and upcoming sites, and so on, but most often it's working on enhancing existing features, and working on new ones. Because we offer premium memberships to folks who primarily want to support the site, many of the new things we do tend to be features we make more available to premium members only, so some things go unnoticed. Premium members can get daily updates on their favorite keywords for collector items, dealer items or classifieds. They have a dashboard that allows them to see these same things when they visit CAF. They get emailed every hour when new items for sale are posted. It's a long list, and many of things have been added to or created in the last year or two. Like CAT, we gave everything away when we were first starting out - there were not even ads on CAF for 3 or 4 years. And like CAT we were collectors first, so we were building the site into something that we wanted to see available to everyone in the hobby, to make finding comic art to browse or buy as easy it could be. We subsidised all the costs in time spent working on CAF through my consulting business, at a considerable loss as you might imagine. But CAF has always been a labor of love for us, and to this day it's the thing I wake up to every morning and the thing that usually ends my evening in one form or another. So could I go back to scraping sites and bring in art for sale for dealers and marketplaces I don't host? It's possible. Maybe we could give away some lighter versions of the premium features available today? I guess I could do that too. I already have all the same features CAT offers they are just presented differently, so extending those features to over 50k active registered users would not be that big a deal. I will have to consider all my options and come to some decisions, but I can say those changes would not be not my first choice. CAF's website, the Dealer sites, the image content network, our mailing systems used by the dealers and CAF, the servers we own and replace every few years, the backup systems we maintain, the secure server rackspace we pay for, and the bandwidth to run all these things are very costly. It is more than most people's monthly mortgage payments, even for the big shark's in our hobby. If any one of those things fail a pretty significant part of the comic art world collapses until we get it fixed, and I'd say that over the last 15 years we've done a decent job of keeping this hobby growing daily with little downtime. I do support my family on the income we derive from all the things we do in this area, and I do get by month to month as there are always challenges we face like hosting increases, partnership % decreases, advertisers and premium members come and go and so on. However, I would not change this lifestyle for a thing because I love what we do. Getting back to my reply to this post, and the general discussion at hand. When we chose to build comic art dealer sites we did so to create a valuable resource to the dealers that chose to work with us, and collectors looking to buy/locate artwork through CAF's varied methods. Our dealer sites are very much geared to selling comic art, managing repped artists, and so on. We continue to build all our dealer sites at 1/3 to 1/4 what I would charge a normal design client for the amount of things we have put into our systems for them, the robust network that hosts them, and the monthly/annual hosting fees I charge them. We literally make nothing from designing and hosting these sites. Our benefit is from providing a service to collectors to find art for sale that normally would not be possible in a given day through CAF, and the dealers gain access to the 300k visitors to the site we get each month and the free exposure we provide their art for sale, as well as the more targetted features the premium members have access to. I benefit in no affiliate manner from the leads and sales I provide to art dealers. As it relates to Google, of course I want them and all typical search engines spidering pages on CAF and each art dealer, and I've made all sites very SEO friendly. I want every dealer and art representative I work with to become incredibly successful, and having a good SEO approach is part of ensuring that - even when the lead to the dealer doesn't involve CAF. Everyone, collectors included, benefit from this approach. And while Google might spider over 250,000 pages on my network every day they do leave a rather small footprint, which we appreciate. Which brings me to CAT. CAT did not leave a small footprint when it scraped my server/database network nor my content delivery network. Last month we saw a huge spike in traffic come across both our networks which usually comes from an Amazon Web Service bot. We're talking several hundred dollars in overage fees in just a few weeks. Our content network charges us the most so after several days we chose to block access there while we tried to determine where this rogue activity was coming from. It was at this point that we learned about CAT just from doing some IP traces. Personally I thought they would have been talking to us all along but it wasn't until a few days after we blocked them from our content network that Nico first reached out to me, cordial but unhappy that he no longer had unfettered access to my network. The cost is the biggest issue to me. To look at it from my perspective, Nico is asking me to indirectly fund his personally inexpensive to host scraping application, using my costly to maintain robust network. While I agree with comicwiz (and Niko) that there are many free ways to do exactly what CAT and CAF both already do as it relates to showing art for sale, it is competitive from an application/website perspective. So I fund his application development while he slowly takes marketshare from CAF for something we already provide to some of our members. It is a conundrum. Hopefully now you understand my position. Nico's one suggestion about copying every dealer image is not going to work. While I told him I did not think it would work well for either of us, I did suggest that paying for access to my network with other restrictions was the best I could come up with. He did not pursue that suggestion, nor offer anything more. That was the end of our discussion. So here we are today. I have no interest in asking all of my art dealers to pay more money to allow this to occur. I have no interest in asking my advertisers to pay more to cover the additional costs this would require. I reached out to Nexus a few hours ago, not because he approached me bearing any pitchforked messages from his clients, but because he's someone I respect and I wanted to present to him what I felt was a compromise in this situation. He agreed with the main point in my approach to resolution so all I can say is we'll see what happens. It might take a day or two to put my compromise together to present him as I have a few other folks to talk to. I'm sure you'll all know the outcome to this later this week. Best, Bill Cox

Yes it was actually. I wanted to get to know other collectors and I felt giving them a place to show their collections would be my way of introducing myself to them. We never had ads on the site, or made any revenue for many years until dealers asked to advertise on the site. What does that have to do with Ankur striking a deal with a seller? The answer would be "absolutely nothing". I've got no opinion about Ankur on a personal level, only that he is clearly in the wrong by suggesting CAF be responsible for his lack of due diligence in vetting a seller. And if that was a reach around I guess I missed the happy ending. You're seriously trying to compare CAF to that? This would be the exact same thing as Ankur meeting a collector at a Con and deciding to buy a piece of artwork after the Con via email. Is the Con responsible for Ankur to have a successful transaction? Not at all. I hope the Seller loses their Square account. I cannot stand people like this. If asked by the appropriate authority I'd love to provide this woman's email addresses I have on file and her IP addresses. It was really easy for me to find her ebay account and professional websites based on it. She deserves to be punished for whatever scheme this might be. But once again suggesting we are responsible is ridiculous. And posts like yours are exactly why I don't frequent boards like these. I won't return. People know how to reach me if they need to.

I attribute the growth trend by year to the simple fact that CAF exposed a great number of people over a few short years to either start to collect original art, or having a place to enjoy or share it. It coincides with the explosion in comic art prices as well. Like I mentioned, we still get over 200k unique people each month on CAF, and 55% + visits are from returning people - so a very regular loyal viewership. We still get 20+ signups every day so it isn't like it isn't growing.

Alex, you joined January 20, 2006, so 11 months earlier.

There are around 113,000 registered users on CAF. You have to know that more than 50% of our traffic is outside the US so there are far more collectors than most of us know. We also don't let people communicate with anyone on CAF without having a registered account, so it forces people to register who do not want a gallery. There are easily 75k to 85k active collectors and those closely interested in the comic art today. We easily get more than 200,000 unique visitors each month. I'm #2 btw. My wife who has done the majority of the site programming, especially in the early days, is #1.

CAF is actually 13 years old in a few weeks. Regarding a standard written policy on how to handle these kinds of situations there isn't one. The only written rule is that we're not part of your transaction, we're not responsible for you to have a successful transaction, and so on. How we react when we get involved with a situation like this varies by the situation. In this case I didn't know the seller and they were new, so I shut off their gallery. I will shut off the gallery of anyone who says we're responsible for their transaction to go well. A month ago I had a member (no gallery, member for many years) claim they didn't get a commission that an artist on CAF did for them, that was commissioned through CAF, that they were told was done and would be shipped but hadn't arrived weeks later. Rather than shut the artist's gallery off I sent them an email letting them know I got a complaint and that I hoped they would take care of it because when they look bad, it makes us look bad. The situation was resolved and everyone was happy. The bottom line is every situation is unique, and while we're not responsible for a member to have a successful transaction, there can be many different ways of handling the situation. In the end you hope that everyone walks away satisfied with the outcome. Dealing with these situations is the absolute least favorite thing I do on CAF, and fortunately they practically never happen.

Turns out I do have an account on here. Haven't used it in 8 years. Thanks to Chris for posting my original reply. I figured it was better for me to personally clarify a few things mentioned in the thread. First, contrary to what Ankur said, his account was not closed at the same time as the seller, it was closed 12 hours later. The reason was because he stated CAF should have responsibility for his deal going wrong. The moment he stated that, I was forced to take the position that he's forgotten the rules of the site and poses a risk to the site and to other members by not knowing or caring for CAF's position on transactions between members. As I mentioned earlier, typically I turn off both parties galleries from the start and that's because the person who feels they were wronged state up front that they feel CAF is somehow culpable for the deal (happens 9/10 times), but with Ankur it didn't happen until long after the fact. My concern is always with protecting the site and it's membership. If that means closing down both parties galleries until the dust settles then that's what has to happen. I never once used the word delete or ban in relation to his account. I said I shut down his gallery. At that point in the conversation between he and I, I didn't feel I needed to extend him any further courtesy of an explanation. Next, I'm not sure what someone was talking about regarding selling user information. Obviously that is not something we'd ever do even if it meant LARGE sums of money. Regarding the suggestion of having a safe section on CAF to buy or sell art. We already have that. Our Dealer search has over 72,000 pieces of art for sale right now, and our Premium Member Classifieds has around 8,000 pieces of artwork. I consider the Classifieds a safe place to conduct purchases because any person willing to pay for a premium membership to gain access to this section on CAF typically is going to handle sales as one would expect. They certainly are not going to be someone trying to scam anyone since a scammer is not going to shell out cash for a premium membership. In this case Ankur struck a deal with a person on CAF whom he knew had not had their gallery for more than a month and they were not a premium member. Two red flags to start, and then they accept a low offer on the art. As far as having a system to show who is a good seller or not, we do not have a feature like that as of today but we do show a person's ebay handle when they provide it in their profile, in part so another member can see their feedback for situations like this. Regarding getting back to things related to the seller all I can disclose is that their name is Julie Johnston. After Ankur's original email I had a few emails with her where I told her I had shut off her gallery, and I requested she send me proof from Square that she refunded the money to him in order for me to consider turning her gallery back on, and she did admit to needing to refund the money so it was clear that something had happened. These emails with her was going on hours before the emails that led to my having to shut down his gallery. When the responsibility remark came up I was chafed to say the least, and had to follow policy at that point. I would add so that he's aware of it, that if a formal request was made by his credit card company I'd gladly hand over the data I have on file for her. At any rate, I've nothing more to add to this conversation unless someone has any other questions about our site's Ts and Cs. If people don't appreciate the policies we have in place they don't need to use or visit CAF.