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I've been running a Calvin & Hobbes bot for ~20 years now. Back when Google Reader was a thing, the bot published an RSS feed which had greater than >1M subscr
by wdr1 4y ago
I've been running a Calvin & Hobbes bot for ~20 years now. Back when Google Reader was a thing, the bot published an RSS feed which had greater than >1M subscribers. It's now a bot on Reddit (/u/CalvinBot) with >700k karma.
During that time, I've tried to be very mindful of Watterson's copyright and make sure I don't violate it anyway.
This had led to some interesting "bugs." Specifically amuniversal.com only publishes the comic strip as a GIF. But the official Reddit mobile app has a bug. It treats all GIFs as a video & disables other image features, like zooming. The nature of C&H is such that very often want to zoom to see all the wonderful details Mr. Watterson put into the strip.
Because of that I routinely get complaints about it being in a GIF ("GIFs are for movies!" the whippersnappers say) and tell me to publish them as JPG or PNG. Now converting a GIF to JPG or PNG is trivial, but there's no way I can do so without violating his copyright. I'd have to host the converted image myself, which I don't have the right the do.
So I won't do it.
It's minor, but knowing Watterson felt so passionate about copyright, I think it's important to honor. But because the team at Reddit won't fix the bug, the complaints continue to come rolling in. Enough that I wrote a FAQ about it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CalvinBot/comments/bdxb6h/why_are_posts_in_a_gif/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CalvinBot/comments/bdxb6h/why_are_p...
If any C&H fans knows anyone on the team at Reddit, I'd much appreciate it if you could ask them to fix it.
- LeoPanthera 4y agoThis is a very common bug. Lots of software think all gifs are animated - Telegram is a good example. We've all forgotten our history.
- Fatnino 4y agoGif is a text format https://www.w3.org/Graphics/GIF/spec-gif89a.txt https://www.w3.org/Graphics/GIF/spec-gif89a.txt ctrl+f "25."
- gjs278 4y ago
- arijun 4y agoI can’t read your link because Reddit thinks it’s “Unreviewed Content“, a fairly transparent play to get me to download the app or log in.
- boogies 4y agoI can because LibRedirect (https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect) automatically redirected it to https://libreddit.projectsegfau.lt/r/CalvinBot/comments/bdxb6h/why_are_posts_in_a_gif/ https://libreddit.projectsegfau.lt/r/CalvinBot/comments/bdxb...
- culi 4y agoThe redesigned reddit is unusable ~~on mobile~~. You need to change the "www" subdomain to "old" like this: https://old.reddit.com/r/CalvinBot/comments/bdxb6h/why_are_posts_in_a_gif/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CalvinBot/comments/bdxb6h/why_are_p...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tim333 4y agoI'm puzzled - clicking on your bot's link give me a jpg eg. https://assets.amuniversal.com/34775360b564013aaab1005056a9545d.jpg https://assets.amuniversal.com/34775360b564013aaab1005056a95... for today.
- wdr1 4y agoNo, it's a GIF. This is explained in the FAQ I linked, but the file suffix (which probably made you think it's a JPG) doesn't matter. If you check the magic number, it's a GIF. I changed the file suffix to "trick" some apps/extensions into treating it as an image instead of a movie.