F.A.Q. : The Site

Is your site Commercial?

Having said that, we do offer links to Amazon.Com and pass the affiliate ID of our ISP. They (our ISP) collects a small comission, as some sort of partial recompense for the free hosting that they give us.

This absolutely does not affect our reviewing of any item. If you have a look through our book reviews, you'll find that we give poor web ratings to many books, and there is no correlation between the presence of an Amazon referral link and the quality of the rating.

We strive to reference every Spider-Man book and comic ever produced. If it is present on Amazon, we link to it. The staff reviewing the books receive no reward for giving a better or worse review.

We do frequently link to commercial sites, especially from our News page. Often we quote press releases or provide other information about special promotions. We do this purely out of good will, and purely on good faith. We do not purport to have evaluated any products or services. We never receive any commission ever from companies for whom we provide this publicity. Never. We frequently receive offers of comissions, and decline them without exception.

We do occasionally receive advance copies of books to review, or receive samples of products for the purpose of review. This doesn't happen very often, and we always mention it when it does so that you can consider it as a factor when you evaluate our reviews.

Would SpiderFan like to be our affiliate site?

We don't want to become a franchise of your huge pop-entertainment site. We don't want to become a sister site, or run a shared promotion to boost traffic. We don't want to link to you in return for a share of revenue. We definitely don't want to run your banner ads or other marketing material.

We do appreciate the sentiment. But we don't need to complicate our lives.

We wish you all the best with your commercial or affiliated site venture. If you want us to link to your site, see the following F.A.Q.

Would SpiderFan like to swap banners with my site?

I guess you haven't noticed yet, but we don't actually have any banners or ads on our site. It's just not something we do. SpiderFan doesn't need to post banners on anybody elses site. If people are looking for Spidey stuff that we have, Google will send them our way. We don't need to advertise.

But don't give up just yet. Check out the following F.A.Q. question. Maybe we can do something for you.

Will SpiderFan please add a link to my site?

If you fall into one of the categories of sites that we link to, then kindly email Steve Christensen and give him the details:

1. Your URL
2. The Name of your site.
3. What category you belong to.

How did you create this web site?

The web-site started as "The Marvel On-Line Quiz Site", but gradually became Spidey-Specific, and much broader in content than just a few on-line quizzes.

After a year or two, I started getting offers of help - many of which I accepted. We now have a pool of around 30 part-time staff, of which 10 or so seem to be active at any given time.

The vast majority of the HTML is created by Perl scripts working off a database of text files. Using text files means that I can use CVS to track changes to file content over time.

Staff use Perl CGI forms in their web-browser to edit and create site content. The HTML files are regenerated whenever a change to file content is detected.

All site editing is performed on our development site, dev.spiderfan.org, and uploaded periodically to our production site, www.spiderfan.org.

There is still a handful of static, hand-edited HTML remaining, specifically in our Audio, Cards Shows, and Software pages. I am currently working on adding them to the text database also, so that they can be edited online by other staff too.

How come all the JPG images are broken on SpiderFan?

First, you have to understand what "deep linking" is. That's when other sites (i.e. not SpiderFan) directly reference an image that lives on the SpiderFan site. Why would they do that? Well, by referencing our images, the website gets the advantage of offering you the image, but they don't have to pay for the network traffic when you download that image.

Deep linking an image is called "leeching". It's basically "stealing". Worse - it's like stealing a car, then coming back each week to steal petrol too! Sites that leech steel content and bandwidth. We don't like that. So we have a mechanism in place that blocks that.

The way this mechanism works is that whenever you load an image, we insist that the image is embedded in a SpiderFan web page, and NOT in somebody elses web-site. In technical terms, that means that we insist that the "Referrer" header on any http image request is from the SpiderFan domain. Whenever your browser (IE or FireFix or whatever) makes a request for an image, it passes the Referrer header to say what web page the request came from.

It is possible for some sites to use the Referrer header somewhat like a cookie, so they can track which sites you visit. They can't identify you, but they can say "Oh, some guy visited site A, then B, then C." I guess they use it for high-level marketing purposes. It doesn't really bother me, but some people don't like it.

So that's why there are a number of ways that you can disable the Referrer header.

1. Some FireFox extensions that allow you toE.g. "refspoof", "Stealthier". You can manually do it in FireFox by entering the URL "about:config" and setting the the FireFix configuration parameter "network.http.sendRefererHeader" to a value other than "2".

2. Some firewall software such as Norton Internet Security and Norton Personal Firewall have options to disable referral headers. With Norton I believe that under "Privacy Control -> Configure -> Advanced" you can request that referer headers be sent to some websites, but not others.

A better solution if you want to stop being tracked like that is to swap to using FireFox and install the wonderful FireFox extension AdBlock. If you configure it properly it will not only stop you being tracked, but will also make pages load faster!

Why isn't (Spider-Lizard, Doppelganger, etc.) in the costumes section?

We know about the gap, and we appreciate your input. What we would really appreciate is somebody with a vast knowledge of Spider-Man, an experience in HTML, a scanner, and plenty of spare time to actually do all that stuff for us! If that's you, then for goodness' sake Mail Me.

Why don't you review (comic X, villain Y, etc.)?

If you have a great idea, then you're welcome to Mail Me - but you'll get a far more enthusiastic response if you're also offering the time and resources to help put the idea into practice.

And yes, we know that Blade, Captain America, <insert whoever> is missing from the Spidey Friends page. Thanks!

Why don't you add the Ultimate Spider-Man Characters?

Maybe one day, if we finish ALL the regular universe characters then we might give Ultimate a go, but for now, we're just not going to bite off more than we can chew. Sorry. Naturally, the same also goes for the MC2 universe and the 2099 universe.

Of course, we do get people writing and saying "Hey, I'll help". That's a million times better than an email just telling us how crap we are for not doing it, but it's not necessarily a perfect answer. Even if people do help, it still takes time to train people up and get them writing profiles. Then it takes time to file and categorise the profiles.

Then, the next problem is that even if somebody does get keen and write up two or three profiles before running out of steam and just dropping out of sight, we'd then be left with five Ultimate profiles out of fifty. We would get a ton of email from people pointing out all the other characters we have to do - and we've just created more work and more bad press than before!

So, if you are thinking about complaining about our lack of Ultimate/2099/MC2 profiles, then you'd better be prepared to get off yer lazy butt and actually help. And if you're going to help, it would be great if you knew a little bit about writing for a website, a bit about HTML, and most importantly if you realised that you were taking on the job of writing dozens of character profiles and were prepared to stick the job out to the end!

Well, you did ask.

How do I send you a Character Quiz for your site?

Then, just put it into the right format for our site! You can do that by using our nifty Quiz Template. Send it to our "Fans" section sub-editor, Max Lacey and he will add it to the site.

If you don't put it into the template format, then it'll probably sit in our inbox for ages until somebody on the staff gets time to do it, or else it just slips off our list. So we're really keen for you to use the Quiz Template and make life easy all round. Thanks!

Can I contribute to your SpiderFun comic strip?

If you feel you're creative, then here's the deal:

• You have an idea for a joke or punchline? Sure, I'll look at it. I occasionally use suggested gags. Not often, but occasionally.

• You have a complete text script? Actually, I'm not sure what to do with these. I can't illustrate them. If I'm going to get involved, I'm going to want to rework it. That takes as much time (if not more) than writing the script from scratch.

  So your choices for scripts are like this:

  1. Send me just the joke, or send me the script, but I'll pull out the joke and rework it. You'll get credit only for the gag.

  2. Find an artist to illustrate it. You can try and ask Heather, but she's a busy girl, and I found her first.

• You have a complete strip, written, illustrated, colored, lettered and ready to post on the site? Great! We'll consider it. As long as it's relatively funny, Spidey-related, family-suitable, and won't get us sued by Marvel, then we'll probably take it as a guest strip and we'll give you and the artist full credit!