The Gneech! Awww Yeah (@the-gneech.meow.social.ap.brid.gy)

A ComicPost comic post in mobile view **ComicPost** is a new webcomic plugin for WordPress and ClassicPress. So far as I can tell it is probably the first comic management plugin focused on trying to prevent AI bots from scraping your artwork for training material with **built-in anti-AI tools**. But they are optional, how little or how much you choose to lock-down your comics is up to you. It is a relatively lightweight plugin that should work with pretty much any theme and play nice with other plugins. If you have already been using the ComicPress theme or Comic Easel plugin it’s not a drop-in replacement but switching should be relatively painless. The idea here is that you don’t need a “kitchen sink” webcomics plugin that tries to do everything. If you need features like monetization or translation or a membership site, use additional plugins specifically designed for those tasks. ComicPost is for posting and protecting comics. That’s pretty much it. github icon Download ComicPost from GitHub _**NOTE:** AI-generated images were used for demonstrative purposes. None of the comics shown actually exist. To figure out how to defeat AI generators I needed to learn how they scrape, train, and work. In the process I produced a ton of AI slop and thought it would be ironic to use those images to promote my anti-AI plug-in._ # ComicPost Features: * **Comic Management** * Custom “comic” post-type * Custom “chapters” hierarchical taxonomy * Schedule comic posts * Host multiple series/title on one site * Can replace ComicPress/Comic Easel * Integration with Ryuzine Press * Integration with ZappBar * **Presentation Settings** * Comic Navigation with multiple styles * Comic Archives, including vertical format mode * Widget Spaces * **Watermarking** * Automatically watermark comics on upload * Generated or Custom watermark image * Tiled or Centered watermarks * Optionally retain/display “clean” images * **Content Restriction** * Disable right-click or drag-to-download of comic images * Watermark or Disable printing of comic images * Encode comic URLs or other content * Omit comics from image galleries * Hide comics posted before a set time-period * Require Login to view comics * **Social Media** * Two, optional, built-in Comic Rating Systems: * Five-Star Ratings with Comments * Post Likes * OpenGraph meta tags for sharing on Facebook or Bluesky platforms * Mastodon self-verification code * **Shortcodes** * Insert Comic * Archive Drop-down List * Chapter Archive List * Social Media Share Buttons * Data Encoder * Members-only Content * User Ratings & Comment Lists * **Anti-AI Theory** * How Do You Stop AI Scrapers? * Using Content Restriction * Using Watermarks * Getting Serious Against AI * What About Human Thieves? * Plugin FAQ # Looking for something simpler? There is also a **ComicPost Lite Plugin** that doesn’t include any of the anti-AI or Social Media stuff. Here’s what’s in it: * Custom “comic” post-type * Custom “chapters” taxonomy * Basic Comic Management * Basic Comic Navigation (you can still restyle it in your theme though) * Archive Drop-Down List Shortcode * Chapter Archive List Shortcode * Insert Latest Comic Shortcode * Reading Order Comic Archives That’s it! It doesn’t even have a settings/options page. It’s an incredibly lightweight, bare-bones comic management plugin. github icon Download ComicPost Lite from GitHub # Comic Management ComicPost creates a “comic” custom post-type and a “chapters” custom taxonomy. If you were previously using the ComicPress theme or Comic Easel plugin, and were using the default settings, your site would already have content created with those, and so ComicPost would allow you to continue managing that existing content. _Disclosure: I was a contributor to both the ComicPress and Comic Easel projects, and ComicPost uses some code from those projects to make switching easier. ComicPost and Comic Easel have different goals and feature sets, only you can decide which one works best for you._ comic post management ComicPost Chapters Manager By default Chapters are sorted by name, which is alphabetical order. You can see in the screenshot above sub-chapters are being shown out of order because of this. Under “Issue #1” they are in 1, 3, 2 order because the names start with G, I, and W. For “Issue #2” they are out of order the same way because the name alphabetically sort by O, Th, and Tw. ComicPost’s “Chapter List” and “Archive Drop-down” by default will sort by chapter SLUG rather than name. You should probably get in the habit of manually editing the chapter slugs to ensure sorting by them places your sub-divisions in the correct order (when sorted by slug). In that screenshot above the original, automatically generated slugs would have been “issue-1,” “glasses-debut,” “im-class-rep,” “wait-they-think-im-smart,” “issue-2,” “chapter-one,” “chapter-two,” and “chapter-three.” They were manually edited to the slugs you see above so, when sorted by slug, they will be shown in the correct order regardless of what the actual name (title) of the chapter sub-division is. You’ll also notice that the “Description” entries simply show the intended order as well. Most themes don’t show category/taxonomy descriptions. The ComicPost Chapter List has an option to display it, but if it’s any longer than what’s shown it doesn’t work very well. The basic recommended layout for your hierarchy might be like this: * Title / Character * Volume / Year * Story Arc / Issue * Episode / Chapter / Part Ultimately it’s up to you how you organize the comics on your website, and you’re not stuck with it either. Let’s say you originally just set up _Title > Issue > Part_ and later on you realize you want each year of issues to be in a “Volume” you can create your volume container later, set it’s “parent chapter” to the title, and then edit all the issues you want in it by changing their “parent chapter” to the volume, which will in turn automatically move all the parts in the issue with it. Because it’s all hierarchical. _**Note:** Try not to be too confused that the custom taxonomy is called “chapters” but you may have sub-divisions that are your actual chapters. The taxonomy has to be called something other than “categories” and if you only draw one comic you may only be listing actual chapters under this taxonomy._ # Presentation Settings ## Comic Navigation There are four different global navigation modes to choose from that determine how the “Previous” and “Next” links/buttons work in the comic navigation controls: **Within Chapter:** goes to the “Previous/Next” comic only within the current chapter, and “Oldest/Newest” are limited to the current title (single chapter navigation). **Traverse Chapters:** will go to the “Previous/Next” comic in the current chapter until it reaches either the start or end of that chapter, then it will jump into the next comic (by date relative to the current comic) in an adjacent chapter within the same title hierarchy. “Oldest/Newest” are limited to the current title. (This is probably the navigation you want). **Cross Titles:** will go to the “Previous/Next” comic in the current chapter until it reaches either the start or end of that chapter, then it will jump to the next comic (by date relative to the current comic) in an adjacent chapter even if it is in a different title hierarchy. “Oldest/Newest” are the first and most recent comics posted from any title. **Ignore Chapters:** will got to the “Previous/Next” comic relative to the date of the current comic, ignoring the chapters and titles (pure date navigation). “Oldest/Newest” are the first and last comics posted from any title. _IMPORTANT! The Comic Navigation system works by post date and time. If you have two posts scheduled/published within the same minute the navigation will go to the wrong comic or skip over it in chapter-only mode. As long as you don’t have two comics with exactly the same date and time this isn’t a problem, but I did run into this in testing when I’d scheduled two posts to go live at the exact same time. Just make sure you don’t do that._ You can choose whether or not the Comic Navigation controls appear above or below the comic image. There are also several different styles available (these are the same as the ones used by ComicPress/Comic Easel). The default appearance just uses text links. If you are going for a minimalist look or are custom styling the links/buttons select this appearance: Comic Navigation Links Box Style Navigation Comical Style Navigation NPC Style Navigation Sci-Fi Style Navigation Silver Style Navigation _Note: if you don’t want some of the buttons they should be hidden using “display: none;” in your theme’s stylesheet._ ## Comic Archives ComicPost automatically adjusts Comic Archives so they are in reading order oldest to newest (WordPress archives are normally newest to oldest). There is also an option to override the number of posts shown in an archive. Normally it would use whatever was under _Settings > Reading_ in the main admin menu. But you can set this to some other number for a better experience for your readers catching up in the archives. For example, if your “issue” is normally 24 pages you could set “Archive Post Count” to that and your readers would get an entire issue to read in a single comic archive page. Some themes do not show Featured Images as links to the post, so ComicPost has an option called “Archive Thumbnail Links” that tries to override the theme and turn the comic image (which is a Featured Image) into a link to the comic post. There are also three different views for Comic Archives: **Theme/None:** uses whatever appearance is set up in the theme (default setting) **Vertical View:** only the comic images are displayed (not post titles, excerpts, etc.) in one vertical column with no spacing above or below the images. **Multiple Views:** adds buttons to the top of comic archive pages allowing the reader to switch between four different views: single, 2-up (spreads), 3-up, and 4-up. Multi-View Buttons for Comic Archive (appearance for buttons from theme) “Vertical View” and “Multiple Views” will also try to remove all spacing above and below the comic images. If you are posting comics in “Vertical Format” you probably want this, as normally comics in that format are one very, very tall image that is sliced into smaller images with no space between them. Though you’ll have to post each section as it’s own comic post, and there is no standard height, so you can slice them where ever makes sense (like between panels) so they work as individual “pages” too. The video below shows the Comic Archives in action, and you can see how there is no spacing between the pages, and how it presents this entire episode in one installment similar to the “vertical format” popularized by the WebToon site: https://www.kmhcreative.com/labs/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/comicpost_vertical_format.mp4 There is no built-in way, however, for your readers to _comment_ on a comic archive. In WordPress comments are attached to the ID for a post or page and archives are dynamic searches with no ID to attach to. So your readers would need to click on an individual comic image to go that comic post and comment there. _Note that Comic Archives do require that your theme actually displays Featured Images on archive pages. It also tends to work better with themes from before WordPress introduced blocks._ The front-end screenshots here show ComicPost being used inside my “SevenToon” webcomic theme. ## Widget Spaces The primary purpose of the widget spaces around the comic, at least from what I’ve observed, is the placement of advertisements to generate revenue for the website. I’ve seen a lot of webcomics that used to use “Project Wonderful” ads and now use its successor “ComicAd Network.” If you’ve been using ComicPress or Comic Easel for years you may have been using the widget spaces around your comic posts for exactly that. Which is why I retained them in ComicPost, but **they are not enabled by default**. You have to actually tick a box in the ComicPost Settings to enable them. I think they only show up in the ComicPress theme even if you enable them in Comic Easel, and they display as “table” elements and are not responsive. ComicPost can display them in any theme and they are responsive thanks to using modern “flex box” styling. Though I’d really recommend only using the “Above” and “Below” comic spaces, the “Left” and “Right” ones will reduce the size of your comic art which is, presumably, the reason people are visiting your site. You’d be better off putting tower ads in a post/page sidebar than alongside your comics. But I kept the basic layout from ComicPress for those that want to keep it. ComicPost widget spaces and other features. # Watermarking ComicPost features a built-in “Watermarking” function, that can automatically overlay a custom graphic or generated text to your comic image on uploading them to a comic post. The watermark can either be centered or tiled. The tiles are square and can be between 50 x 50 pixels and 500 x 500 pixels. If you select “Custom” for _Watermark Image Source_ you need to upload the image you wish to overlay as a watermark. Otherwise the “Generated” settings will be used. Watermark Options ## Custom Watermark Image Whatever image you upload it is going to be reformatted by the watermark creation script. It is recommended your image be a PNG file with a transparent background. It can be in color but black and white images work better for watermarks. If you have a distinctive icon or logo that would be a good choice for watermarking that conveys ownership and provenance of the images watermarked with it. ## Generated Watermark Generated Watermark Settings Enter the pixel size for your generated tile (100-500 are allowed, 300 x 300 is the default). Next enter the text you want to appear as the watermark. In the example above it’s just the name of the plugin. You will probably want to enter something like “© Your Name” or your “domain.com” that identifies the ownership or source of the image. Then decide whether you want the text to be horizontal or diagonal (the latter works better for longer text). Lastly, decide which font you want the text to be rendered in: Watermark Font Options These six fonts were chosen because they give you a good variety, including a wide and a condensed font, and they are bold enough to render well as watermark tiles. They were also all either public domain or under open font licenses. ## Watermark Opacity Opacity Slider You probably don’t want the watermark to obscure anything important in your artwork like dialogue in word balloons so I’d recommend against setting the overlay opacity to high. But you also don’t want to set it so low a simple contrast adjustment removes it from your image. The default 50% opacity is just a starting point. You should play around with this to get it how you like it, especially if you are using a custom watermark image. Try uploading comic art from a comic post, see how it looks, go back to the ComicPost Options and tweak this, and do that until you like the results. Changing the opacity does not require regenerating the watermark. ## Creating & Deleting Watermarks Once you’ve set up everything for your watermark (whether generated or custom) you need to SAVE the options before you can actually generate the watermark image tile. After Saving Options you’ll come back to the Options first tab, return to the Watermark tab and press that friendly green “Create Watermark File” button. If all goes well a new folder will be created in your _/wp-content/uploads/_ folder with the watermark image file in it. Create & Delete Buttons If the watermark image file doesn’t look right to you or you later decide to change watermark images click that big red “Delete Watermark File” button and the watermark PNG file in that folder will be deleted. Change whatever settings need changing, SAVE those settings, then come back and press the green button to make a new watermark image. Note that if you can always upload a custom image to that _uploads/comic_watermark_ folder to override the generated image. ComicPost will try to use whatever “watermark.png” image is in the folder. The requirement to save settings and then come back to create/delete the files is purposely clunky to prevent you from accidentally removing or overwriting your watermark image file. It works off of whatever settings are saved in the database not whatever settings you just changed on the options page. ## Watermark Preview After you save your settings and the watermark image is generated, the “Watermark Preview” section of the Options shows you want the watermark image tile looks like and approximately what it will look like overlaid on a comic page. There are buttons to change the preview between full Color, Grayscale, and Line Art. Note that this is just an approximation, sometimes the opacity isn’t accurately depicted depending on the image, because this isn’t actually compositing the two images. ## Clean Copies What are “Clean” copies? They are images that are NOT watermarked. Enabling “Keep Clean Copy” will still generate a watermarked copy of image, but it _also_ generates a copy _without_ the watermark. Why would you want to do this? Well, some people may wish to show watermarked copies on the public facing pages of their site but show unwatermarked “clean” copies to their logged-in readers/members as a perk if you also enable “Show Clean Copies.” **I strongly recommend you DO NOT USE this feature** as _it pretty much defeats the purpose of watermarking_ your images because you’ll have to trust that your readers will not download and share the clean images. They also come with a bunch of other caveats: * No thumbnails or other sizes of the clean copy will be generated * Clean copies will not appear in your Media Gallery or site database * There will be no links or attachment page for the clean copy * Clean copies cannot lazy load * Clean copies cannot be used in image source sets For all intents and purposes the clean copies effectively don’t exist so far as WordPress is concerned. But that all means it will be nearly impossible for an AI scraper bot or even a search engine crawler to ever FIND these clean copies. Because they are also all given a unique filename suffix you define (or you can just use the auto-generated one). Note, however, if you ever change this suffix any previously created clean copies will also be unknown to ComicPost. You would have to go into your WordPress upload sub-folders and manually find these images by FTP to retrieve, rename, or delete them. It would be far better to keep any clean copies off the internet. Seriously, consider not using this feature. # Content Restriction The Content Restriction settings are intended to prevent people and some bots from easily downloading, scraping, indexing, or printing your comic images from your website. These are not foolproof and they come with tradeoffs in appearance and performance. They should really only be applied to PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE comic images. Your archives should, ideally, be hidden behind a login or paywall instead. Though these options attempt to preserve the alt-text, consider that these features may adversely affect site accessibility for people with disabilities. Note that, apart from the encoding options, the others rely on stylesheets being loaded and will not prevent bots from reading your image URLs. **The Content Restriction settings ONLY apply to comic posts**. If you attach a comic image to a regular post, page, or some other custom post type none of the following settings will be applied to that image. Okay, so when you go to _ComicPost > Options > Content Restriction_ this is what you’ll see: Content Restriction Settings **Advanced Meta Tags:** This adds “NoAI” and “NoImageAI” advanced meta tags to the <head> section of your website, which are intended to signal to web crawlers, bots, and AI scrapers that you do not wish your content to be used to train AI models. Please note that whether or not a bot honors this or not is voluntary and some AI companies have already said they will not. You should also put a more detailed notice in your Terms of Service page (see the “Shorcodes” section within the plugin for some suggested text). **Comics Under Glass:** this option moves the comic from the <img> tag to a background image, then adds an invisible layer over that comic that prevents right-clicking or dragging the image out of the browser window to download it. **Printing Comics:** (requires “Comics Under Glass” be enabled). There are three options available: * **Allow Printing –** as the name implies it does nothing to prevent people printing comics from your website. * **Watermark Prints –** overlays a generated SVG image on any print of your comic page. Printing is only possible with “background images” enabled in the print dialog, otherwise the space where the comic is will be blank. * **Disable Printing –** will prevent the comic image from being printed at all. The “watermark” used for the second option in the drop-down is NOT the same as the watermark image composited to image uploads. It isn’t actually a watermark at all, just a generated image overlaid using stylesheets. The print “watermark” has the following options: * **Method:** Tile or Center the image over the comic * **Text:** enter a short bit of text you would like the generated image to say. This could be the URL for your website or maybe “Buy My Book!” or whatever other message you want. * **Opacity:** how prominently you want the watermark to appear over the comic image. **Encode Comic URLs:** Enabling this option will encode and obfuscate the URLs of your comic image files. Even bots that can crawl, scrape, and index your site’s HTML source code will not be able to find the image addresses. However there are some bots that can render the page and they may be able to get the decoded URLs. Decoding the URLs requires JavaScript. In Comic Archives this could adversely affect performance. Note that, by design, this also disables “lazy loading” of images and “source sets.” **Apply to Archives:** if any of the above features are enabled they normally only apply to the comic posts themselves. Ticking this checkbox will also apply the settings to images in Comic Archives and Search Results. Note that this can adversely affect site performance. **Apply to Public Posts ONLY:** normally the above options are applied to comic images whether readers are logged in or not. If you tick this box they will only be applied to the public-facing comics for anonymous readers or those who are not logged into your website. more content restriction settings **Omit Comics From Galleries:** ticking this box will omit comic images attached to comic posts from being included in image galleries. You should only do this if you are not watermarking your comic images. WARNING: this option intercepts and alters the gallery output code, a simpler solution is to just make sure you never add any un-watermarked comic images to a gallery. **Hide Old Comics:** this option hides comics _older_ than the selected time period from PUBLIC view. Users who are logged into your website will still be able to see and read them. This ONLY hides the comic image, not the entire comic post. Your options for time periods are: * Show All: does nothing to hide any comics * 1 Day * 3 Days * 1 Week * 2 Weeks * 1 Month * 3 Months * 6 Months * 1 Year * 3 Years * 5 Years Below the drop-down is a checkbox allowing you to also completely hide comic posts from users who are not logged in. For comic posts older than the timeframe selected users will see a “404 Not Found” error page and old comics will be entirely filtered out of Archives and Search results. This only works if “Hide Old Comics” is set to something other than “Show All.” It is recommended that you use a custom 404 error page in your theme so public/guest users will know _why_ the comic was not found and offer them a chance to register and sign into your site, and not to just think your site is broken. **Require Login:** this is the “nuclear option” for locking down your comic content. It requires users to be logged in to see ANY of your comic images in comic posts, archives, and search results. Note that the widget spaces around comics, if enabled and populated, will still be shown. **Secure Comic Content:** requires users to be logged in to see the comic post TEXT content, even on new comic posts. **Secure Shortcode Comics:** Requires users to be logged in to see comics inserted with the shortcode. Note that you can still override this on a case-by-case basis in the “Insert Comic” shortcode if you want to show it anyway. Comics inserted with the shortcode also override “Hide Old Comics” even if the box is checked to completely hide old comic _posts_ it has no effect on shortcode _image_ visibility. If you need MORE content restriction options or even more granular content restriction options you’ll need to find another plugin to handle that. If you are using a membership plugin they typically have such content restriction options. # Rating Systems ComicPost features TWO optional built-in comic rating systems. The first one is a “Five-Star Rating” system that is tied to reader comments. You’ll be able to see who rated a comic and how they rated it. You can also make rating a comic a required field to submit a comment. The other is just a simple “Post Likes Rating” system. The likes are tied to the post. You’ll be able to see how many readers liked a comic, but you won’t know which readers liked it (and nobody else will either). In the ComicPost Options go to the “Social Media” tab: Rating Settings In the first drop-down choose whether you want to use “Five-Star Ratings” or “Post Like Ratings.” If you choose “Five-Star” then you can optionally make it a required field for comments. I don’t really recommend making it required because that feels a little desperate, but either way readers will only be asked to rate a comic with their first comment on that comic (so they don’t have to keep rating it with every reply if there’s a conversation thread going). Obviously if you’ve disabled commenting on your site you can’t use “Five-Star Ratings.” Rate and Comment Submission Box After submission/approval of the comment would appear like this below the comic post: Comment with Rating _Readers can edit the text of their comment later on but they cannot change the rating._ And under the comic the average star rating for all comments on the comic is shown like this: Average Rating The other option, “Post Likes Ratings” works whether commenting is enabled or disabled on your site. You can customize the text that appears on the “Like” button and the tally next to it. You can also choose between different preset icons, or you can customize your own in your site’s theme stylesheet. “Thumbs-up” is one of the “Post Like Style” icon options. Before anyone has “Liked” a comic readers are invited to be the first to do so: Be the first! After a comic has some likes the text next to the button shows the total count thus far: Comic with Likes If the current, logged-in reader hits that “Like” button the page reloads. The tally message changes and the button changes function to REMOVE the “Like” if the reader wants. Readers can take back their likes at any point in the future. Like becomes Unlike and now it’s YOU and 206 others. Everyone else would see “207 people liked this” because you are number 207. Here’s what the “Hearts” icon option looks like with the text labels customized for “Favorite” instead of “Like”: Hearts and Favorites And the “Stars” icon option with “Star” replacing “Like”: Gold Stars! And a custom option where you set the icon in your theme to whatever you want, with custom label text: Beer Me! There is no administrator dashboard or anything to show you these metrics. However, if you use the “Top Comics” shortcode somewhere on your site it will show you the highest rated comics posts on your site based on whichever of the two ratings systems you enabled. If you do not have a rating system enabled it will show the posts by comment count. If you set up your site with a front-end User Dashboard (or if you’re using a Membership plugin that creates one) there are three shortcodes you can place on that page to show your readers what comics they have rated/liked or commented on. If you’re using the “Post Likes” system users can see a list of comics they’ve hit the “Like” button on. Or if you’re using the “Five-Star Ratings” they’ll see which ones they rated and how. There is also one to show comics on which they’ve commented. By default each of these lists only shows their interactions within the last year, but you can adjust the timeframe in the shortcode using the “from” parameter. # Chapter List Chapter List Shorcode DEFAULT Appearance If you are creating a “Landing Page” for your comic it can be really useful to have links to the various “chapters” available for people to read. The default appearance is a flat list with thumbnail images of the first image in a chapter, the chapter title, the date the last comic was posted in that chapter, and how many total comments there are on comics in a given chapter. A more complete appearance might look like this: Customized List View That has an “indented” layout indicating the chapter hierarchy and includes the number of “Likes” (Favorites, or whatever you wish to call them) and the “Chapter Description” which isn’t something many themes would normally show. In this case they just say “Ep.1, Ep.2, Ep.3” which doesn’t seem very useful, but if the chapters had more colorful names it would help readers know the intent. It’s pretty versatile. You can have everything from a bare-bones text list to a rich list with star ratings and every combination in between. The main thing to know about the _Comic Chapter List Shortcode_ is the difference in how the “include” and “exclude” parameters work. The “include” parameter accepts a comma-separated list of chapter ID numbers, slugs, or names to include, while the other accepts a similar list of ones to “exclude.” But “include” is explicit, it will literally ONLY include the ones you list and none of their children in the hierarchy. The “exclude” will exclude those defined AND the entire tree of everything under them in the hierarchy. # Social Sharing Buttons These days building an audience online means letting people share your content to their social media accounts. To make this easy for you ComicPost includes a built-in shortcode that will add buttons for Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, Tumblr, Reddit, LinkedIn, Pinterest, RSS, and Email. You can pick and choose which of those you want to show and there are several different appearances for the buttons: Label Buttons Text Buttons Large Buttons Medium Buttons Small Buttons # Other Shortcodes The “Shortcodes” tab under _ComicPost > Options_ has detailed information on how to use all of the plugin’s shortcodes, including a list of all parameters and example usage, so I’m not going to cover them all in detail here. But there are also: **Comic Archive Drop-Down List:** this works pretty similar to the Chapter List, just in a drop-down selector format. Actually it’s simpler because it can’t show anything but the Chapter titles and hierarchy. **Data Encoder:** was included because of the option to have ComicPost encode the URLs for your comic images to AI scrapers and search crawlers can’t find them, and since that functionality is already present the shortcode allows you to similar encode ANY sort of arbitrary text you don’t want to be easily indexed. I should note, however, there are some bots that use the rendered version of a page rather than the source code, and this would not stop them from gleaning that data. **Not Public:** lets you hide arbitrary content behind a login requirement. Whatever you wrap in this shortcode will be hidden from everyone who is not logged in. * * * # How Do You Stop AI Scrapers? ComicPost has tools that try to stop AI scrapers. But how DO you stop them? Good question! First of all, what is an “AI scraper” anyway? Well, if you run a WordPress website you’re probably already familiar with “bots.” You’ve probably fought malicious ones trying to spam or probe your site for vulnerabilities, and you’ve selectively encouraged or discouraged various “search bots” and “web crawlers” in your “robots.txt” file to index your site as part of your SEO efforts to get a better search results ranking. Well, an “AI scraper” is just another new kind of bot. It’s one sent out by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) company to crawl through your website following links and copy (steal) as much content as it can, without your permission and without compensating you. This content is then used to “train” the AI using Machine Learning (ML). To be useful as training data the content needs to be accurately tagged regarding what it is. These descriptors are known as “ground truths” in training material parlance. While there are ML programs that can be pretty good at automating much of this process, there is often a bit of “smoke and mirrors” because we now know some of these AI companies simply employed low-wage human workers in under-developed countries to do the tagging manually. It ultimately wasn’t Machine Learning, it also took human labor. Why? Because the training model is only as good as the “ground truths” about the content on which it was trained and ML isn’t always that good at identifying things accurately. So a human needs to check its work and correct it. You’ve probably seen examples of this when you solve a Google Captcha that misidentified motorcycles for bicycles or crosswalks for stairs. For text-generating AI the written content will become part of a Large Language Model (LLM). Text-generating AI is kind of like predictive text on steroids. It makes a guess as to what should come next based on what, statistically, came before. It tries to summarize information from its database in a conversational style, or ape the style of a specific author or publication. For image-generating AI the training models are made up of pictures. So when you ask it to generate an image in a specific style it combines elements in its database that have tags matching your keywords and, depending on the AI program and the model, it might produce terribly bad “nightmare fuel” images or it may produce something that looks like a specific artist drew or painted it in their signature style. Now IF these AI generators were trained on material that the companies owned or licensed the right to use there wouldn’t be any controversy. The problem is that they have predominantly been trained on work “scraped” from the internet without permission or compensation to the intellectual property rights holders. If something on your website was publicly accessible the AI scrapers probably gobbled it up for training material. ComicPost includes an option to enable so-called “Advanced Meta Tags” in the <HEAD> section of your website. This adds a “robots” meta tag for “NoAI” and “NoImageAI” signals that are _supposed_ to tell bots, crawlers, and scrapers that you are opting out of AI training. I say “supposed to” because honoring the Robots Exclusion Protocol is voluntary and now some of these AI companies are saying their bots won’t honor the protocol and will scrape your site whether you like it or not. But these meta tags and your “robots.txt” file were never going to block bad actors from your site anyway. Most of the “Big Tech” AI projects, though, at least _for now_ , seem to be acting in a reputable manner, so there’s no good reason _not_ to signal your site is opting out of their AI training. ## Using Content Restriction Which brings us to our first, and probably most effective, means of stopping them: **LOCK YOUR CONTENT BEHIND A LOGIN!** It doesn’t have to be a paywall, just a login will probably do. Make people sign into your website to see your stuff. That is, unfortunately, probably the future for most of the internet. Everything is going to be locked behind logins and paywalls. Because anything you leave sitting out in public view will become AI training material. The internet is a bad neighborhood, if you leave anything valuable sitting outside someone is going to steal it. ComicPost has built-in features allowing you to partially or completely lock down your comic content. You can require a login to see ANY of your comics. If you’ve got a site that’s been online forever and you have a ton of older material you can optionally lock down your archives that are older than a week or a month or years ago, so they are not publicly available. If anyone wants to read your archives they’d need to sign into your website to do so. I suppose I should mention that if all of that content was or is currently publicly exposed it had probably _already_ been copied for training material by one or more AI scrapers, but new ones are coming online all the time so you could at least prevent _them_ from gobbling up your work too. You get to decide what is “old” content that gets locked behind a login. ComicPost’s content restriction ONLY checks whether or not a user is logged in or not. It is not a membership plugin, it does not take the user “role” into account either. If what you want is a membership site, especially if you want to put up a “paywall” instead of just a login, there are plenty of membership plugins available that offer user role editing, monetization, and more specific content restriction options. As any membership plugin will first require a user to be logged in before it applies any role or capability filters, ComicPost’s content restrictions shouldn’t conflict with any of that. Ah! But what if you’re trying to build your audience and you don’t want the friction of making people log in to see everything? Well, the “Insert Comic” shortcode lets you place comics with or without security features on a case-by-case basis. There is also an “encode comic URLs” feature that will prevent bots from finding the images in your site’s source code. Then there is the automatic “watermarking” feature. ## Using Watermarks Watermarking is a simple but effective means of “ruining” your work as training material, and as more and more AI companies are becoming “black boxes” regarding where their model’s training materials were sourced, could even help you prove they took your images without your permission. Consider what happened when Stability AI trained the model for their Stable Diffusion image generator on public-facing Getty Images stock photos. The image generator ended up producing an obvious, though garbled, version of the Getty Image watermark logo as well, proving the provenance of the training materials. Watermarking doesn’t stop an AI from being trained on our images, it can just make it more obvious if they were. ComicPost ha a built-in watermarking function that can automatically and consistently apply a custom watermark to your comic art when you upload a “Featured Image” to a new comic post. This watermark can simply be some unique text tiled or centered over your artwork, or you can design a custom mark to be composited automatically. With your work watermarked its provenance is known and can be proved no matter where your images might end up. You can allow your images to be shared freely on social media because nobody will be able to claim the images as their own. The automatic watermarking function requires your web server has the PHP “GD” (Graphics Draw) extension enabled. This usually isn’t going to be a problem because it’s pretty standard for webhosts to have this extension enabled if PHP is available. I chose to use GD instead of Imagick because the latter is not available on Windows servers and may not be available on some Linux servers either. WordPress tries to use Imagick if it can, but there’s a reason GD is the fallback image manipulator. However, there is another server-related issue that may prevent you from using the watermarking function: memory allocation. If your image files are large and not enough memory has been allocated on the server the process can run out of memory and fail. Increasing the memory in your **php.ini** file might solve it, but some webhosts don’t let you change that. So what do you do if you can’t automatically watermark your comics? Well, you can always _manually_ watermark a copy of the image _before_ you upload it. Just try to be consistent with the size and placement or it may not be effective against AI training. Generally speaking, you want your watermark to “ruin” any unauthorized use of the image. Meaning it shouldn’t be easy for someone to erase it, crop it out, or cover it up. Note, however, that the watermarking function only works for NEW image uploads and ONLY while editing a comic post type. It will not watermark any _existing_ images, nor will it watermark any new images uploaded to a regular post, page, other custom post type, or the Media Library. If you need to watermark an archive of existing images there are plugins available designed specifically for applying a watermark to Media Library content. # Getting Serious Against AI Watermarking and Content Restriction are fast, easy, and free options for protecting your comic artwork. But what if you want to take your fight against AI to the next level? Well, it’s not going to be fast, or easy, and it might not be cheap either. “Glaze” is a system designed by researchers from the SAND Lab at the University of Chicago to protect human artists from AI by disrupting its ability to mimic their signature style. It introduces a minimal amount of barely perceptible changes to the image that confuse the AI training algorithm into “seeing” a completely different artistic style than you see. The changes are more noticeable in areas with flat color, so Glaze is a little more visible in traditional comic art than on, say, a digital painting. “Nightshade” is another system designed by the same researchers behind Glaze, but this one is designed to “poison” AI training. If Glaze is your defensive tool, Nightshade is your offense. While a human eye will see the image as barely altered, an AI will “see” a dramatically different composition. So dramatically different the AI can be confused into thinking a picture of a cat is a dog or a purse is a cow. Both of these FREE tools are more robust than a watermark or stenography (hidden image). Someone can crop, scale, adjust, blur, add noise, or even screencap the image and the “poison” remains. It’s impossible to easily remove it from the image! That being said, there have been other researchers who found (very complex) ways of getting around Glaze and Nightshade, and this is an AI “arms race” for artists, so the team behind these tools can’t say they are future-proof. But the biggest issue with both Glaze and Nightshade are that they are extremely RESOURCE INTENSIVE! Nightshade is slightly less so, but also takes much longer to finish. You need a computer with a powerful GPU, and preferably a “neural engine” chip, to even run these programs. Many, many digital artists, and webcomics artists in particular, now have nearly or fully “mobile device” workflows. Your laptop or iPad isn’t going to be able to run Glaze and Nightshade. They can also take a long, long time to process an image (in some cases, depending on settings, on the order of HOURS). Even if you have a tricked-out gaming PC you probably don’t want these apps running in the background and killing your system’s performance for doing anything else. Which means if you want to get serious in your fight against AI you will probably need a _dedicated_ high-end computer _just_ to Glaze and Nightshade copies of your work before you upload any of it to the internet. Most webcomics artists probably can’t afford to sink thousands of dollars into a dedicated anti-AI machine. The developers are aware of this, which is why they also created “WebGlaze” which is a FREE web service that Glazes uploaded images using the Amazon AWS Cloud, from which you then download the processed image later. It is paid for by research grants to ensure it is free for artists, assuming those grants continue. BUT it has per-day and per-week limits and is invite-only (see HERE: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/webinvite.html ) and the invitations are seriously backlogged as of this writing. There is presently no web version of Nightshade, though there are plans to eventually integrate it with WebGlaze. A better option is joining the portfolio website “Cara” [https://cara.app]. They have integrated Glaze into their platform for their members, named “Cara Glaze,” which is limited to a generous 30 images per day with a 12-hour daily reset. As it takes a while to apply to the images they send you an email or app notification when a queued image’s processing is finished. You can, of course, _also_ watermark your Glazed or ‘Shaded images. # What About HUMAN Thieves? Well, again, watermarking your images in a way that is not easily removable or concealable without ruining the whole image means the provenance and ownership of your work will travel with it where ever it goes. If you use social media sharing buttons on your website you are _encouraging_ people to, you know, SHARE your artwork. They’re not stealing it, they’re sharing it with your tacit permission. But let’s say that, apart from social media sharing, you don’t want someone downloading your images from your website? Well, ComicPost has a trick up its sleeve to disable right-click “Save Image” or “Open Image in new tab” or dragging your comic out of the browser window to download it. This is done _without_ actually disabling right-click functionality (as that’s bad for accessibility reasons). Note, however, that these options disable “lazy loading” images. But I’m not too worried about that becuase <img sizes=”auto”> is just about here to eliminate lazy loading. It already works in 50% of browsers, so when it is more broadly supported I’ll update ComicPost to use it. Because it does the same thing as lazy loading but doesn’t require multiple image sources or media queries – the browser figures out what to send on its own. But for now, just be aware that lazy loading won’t work with “Comics as Background” or “Encrypt Comic URLs” enabled in ComicPost settings. There are also two options designed to interfere with anyone trying to print out pages from your website. The first one adds a generated watermark over any print-out of the comic image. This is separate from any actual watermark file so it can have a different message. The other option prevents printout of your comic images at all. Ultimately, though, these just create enough friction and hassle that the casual image grabber probably will give up and not bother. But anyone who is familiar with the Developer Tools can easily work around it because to show your comic it has to be downloaded into the browser somehow. So these tools are by no means foolproof. * * * # FAQ **Q. Why are none of my comics showing on comic posts?** **A.** The theme you are using probably doesn’t show the “Feature Image.” You’ll either need to change themes or create a “child” theme that overrides the parent theme’s post layout. **Q. Why are my comic archives empty?** **A.** Assuming you’ve already posted a bunch of comics, the main reasons your archives might be empty are: * You are using a theme that does not show Featured Images in the archives * Your theme does not show custom post type or custom taxonomy archives The solution to either of those problems is to create a “child” theme with both “ _archive-comic.php_ ” and “ _taxonomy-chapters.php_ ” templates. **Q. Why are my image uploads being cropped?** **A.** Normally WordPress creates three additional versions of every image you upload. These are defined under _Settings > Media_ and there is one for “thumbnail” size, one for “medium” size, and another for “large” size. The unlisted fourth is “full size” which is the dimensions of the image you uploaded. But themes and other plugins can add even more sizes! This is why ComicPost has an option to override the theme and display a specific Featured Image size (you’ll probably want to set this to “Full Size” but it depends on your theme and whether images are being scaled or cropped or not). For example, the default “Twenty Fourteen” theme will create a cropped Featured Image, and that’s what it also shows you on the frontend and the backend. But ComicPost can override that and show the Full Size image on the frontend instead. Wheras the default “Twenty Seventeen” theme doesn’t crop the large size it scales it proportionally. You may need to create a “child” theme to override other image manipulation behaviors you don’t want. **Q. Is there a Premium version of ComicPost?** **A.** Nope! I don’t sell premium versions of my themes or plugins. If you see them anywhere online being sold they aren’t from me and you’re being scammed. **Q. Why isn’t ComicPost in the official WordPress Plugin Directory?** **A.** Because I’ve never submitted my plugins to the WordPress Directory. I do test them to see that they meet the requirements for submission and are free of errors, and I could submit them if I wanted to, but I don’t want to. https://www.kmhcreative.com/comicpost/