Frequently Asked Questions

• General questions
• Comic questions
• Not Safe For Work (NSFW) strips
• Miscellaneous stuff

General questions

What is WordOwl?

WordOwl is a search engine designed for web-based comic strip (webcomics), such as Bruno the Bandit and Cyanide & Happiness.

Isn't this like Oh No Robot?

Yes and no. Yes - because it searches webcomics, finds the best ones for you and so on. But no, because it doesn't ask others to do the transcriptions - all the webcomics here are transcribed by us. A more in-depth comparison is available here in the Blog.

How can I contact you? There isn't an email address or contact form?

If you have any questions about WordOwl, or anything you want to drop in an email to us, just fire it off to wordowl@wordowl.com.

Any pretty link icons?

Actually, yes! Please save these to your own server if you want to use these on your website.

• 80x15 GIF:
• 88x32 PNG:

Comic questions

A strip has a typo! How do I report it?

Well, each strip should be a perfect mirror of the original, typos included. So if you see a typo, the original strip itself might have a typo. If, though, it is a typo and the original strip has not got the same, please drop me an email at the above address, quoting the strip's name, date and what the error is and I'll fix it as soon as possible. (There are a very select few where typos have been corrected to enable them to be searched effectively.)

What do these symbols mean?

• Strips marked with a are considered 'not safe for work' (see below)
• Strips marked with a are animated in some way. Sometimes this is very aggressive animation and may not be suitable for sufferers of epilepsy. There are also some strips (notably from Ashfield Online) marked as animated due to being interactive.
• Strips marked with a are guest strips, contributed by other artists in place of the regular artist(s).

Can I volunteer to help transcribe strips? / How do I submit transcriptions?

To be honest, we're not looking at either option; the biggest incentive for us to write WordOwl was the inconsistencies within similar sorts of search engines. I wanted to ensure that each transcription was as accurate as it could be, and to be honest there is a bunch of stuff collected in the data files other than just dialogue, and in all honesty it'd take me a similar amount of time to check and ensure it's in the right format as it would to write it from scratch - I just want it to be consistent and correct, and it's easier for me to ensure consistency I'm happy with by doing it myself. That said, if the site ever gets towards taking over my life to the exclusion of all else, we'll reconsider our position.

What do all the different colours in a search result mean?

Well, hopefully it should be fairly clear from the strip itself, but just in case it's not:

• Text written in a colour - normal spoken dialogue, with the colour denoting which character.
• {{Text in italics and curly brackets}} - a thought, with the colour denoting which character.
• Text in monospace - text typed on a computer/terminal of some kind.
• Text in this style - text written in the strip, perhaps a letter or poster.
• TEXT IN CAPS AND BOLD - a sound effect.
• Text marked in lines - a caption or inset box, such as the 'Meanwhile...' boxes in the corner of strips.

Isn't this breach of copyright?

No. Some webcomics are licensed under a Creative Commons license which would permit this, but in order to avoid any disputes, each webcomic owner is contacted before being listed and permission is thus obtained. In the event of disputes, we will try and settle it amicably with the copyright holder, usually the artist, but if the artist requests we remove or change it, even after permission is given, we will side with the artist.

What happens with characters where, somehow, their bodies have been switched?

Well, in those cases, such as the Role Reversal story arc from Bruno the Bandit, the easiest way is to attribute each line of dialogue to the character it appears to be - if a line was said by Fiona while in Bruno's body, it would appear to be Bruno saying it.

I see links to merchandise! What gives?

Well, in order to help keep webcomics alive, some of the artists sell strip-related merchandise. Where a comic has a specific item of merchandise directly related to it (e.g. a t-shirt featuring that exact strip), there may be a link underneath the comic in WordOwl, to encourage it. NB: I do not receive a cut of any of the merchandise, it's simply to help out the artists.

Why does the search sometimes say 'of over 1,000 results'?

Some searches will turn up over 1,000 different strips that are matched. Now, it is extremely unlikely you'd actually want the 1,001st result, so the site doesn't return all of the matches it finds, only the best 1,000 are available. (Next time you do a search in Google, and it tells you it finds 10 million hits, try going on past the first 90 pages or so... it does basically the same thing.)

Not Safe For Work (NSFW) strips

What's the deal with NSFW strips?

Well, I don't know about most people, but what I do know is that a lot of people read strips at work. Since now their contents are being made available in text, some company web filters may get upset. Thus you can restrict searches to those without profanity or questionable content. (Even if you then throw in a search which contains profanity for example, it won't be matched normally).

How is a strip marked NSFW?

Normally the site's data management code will flag a strip once it is added, based on rules around profanity. Additionally, if we find a strip which we believe will cause general offense, we'll also mark it as NSFW. Again, any questions regarding this, please throw them to me at the above address.

How do I search strips that would be marked NSFW?

In the advanced search there is an option for including such strips; they are excluded by default so you have to turn them on.

Miscellaneous stuff

Where does the name come from?

Around 2006, I was playing around with some ideas for a word-games site, which includes word-game resources, word finders, that kind of thing. It had this mascot, Bob, who was a word owl. Not sure why, though, but when I came round to build WordOwl, as it stands right now, it actually seemed a worthwhile use of the name and domain.

How long does it take to add a strip?

Adding a new webcomic to the site is about 5-10 minutes to set it up, plus a further 3-5 minutes for each strip, depending on how complex the strip is, how much dialogue, that sort of thing. Dialogue-heavy comics will take longer, as will ones with many panels per strip. But a general figure of 3-5 minutes per 4 panels is about right.

What powers WordOwl?

Technical stuff. Seriously, though, the live site is powered with PHP and Sphinx, while the development server where comics are transcribed runs the same again, as well as MySQL, as a form of interim storage. (The blog does use MySQL though). The graphs on the statistics pages are almost all drawn with JpGraph.

Why "Ka-Pow!"?

It all started with a pair of socks my partner bought me, with the words "Ka-Pow!" on the side, part of a set of 5 pairs with "super-hero sounds". Whenever you see a Ka-Pow button, it activates the super secret super-ability that the site has, and instead of giving you some search results, it takes you directly to the best-matching comic.

How random is the random strip browser?

It should be pretty random, but it is biased slightly - it picks a webcomic, then picks a strip from it, rather than picking from the entirety of available strips. This way larger webcomics get equal coverage to smaller ones.

What's your favourite strip?

Ouch, that's such a hard question. Well, I don't have an overall favourite per se, since I like many different ones, they all have their own special appeal. I guess, if pushed though, I do have a single favourite strip from all the webcomics I've seen. It's this one, strongly NSFW though: Cyanide & Happiness, number 666