GPF News

Hey there, folks. Just dropping a News post on you to give a few important updates:

GPF Year Twenty-Four and the Beginning of the End: My, that sounded ominous, didn't it? Fret not, loyal readers. GPF's grand finale should be a time of celebration, not melancholy. I'm doing my best to wrap up as many story arcs as a I can and give the strip a satisfying conclusion, while still giving you the humor, drama, and sentient slime molds that you love.

Year Twenty-Four began at the beginning of November (actually, October 31st) with The Entropy War, our fourth and final "mega-arc". Like Scylla and Charybdis, I expect this to last a total of two years, with the story, Year Twenty-Five, and the comic itself ending in October 2024. There's a "mini-FAQ" included in the November 2, 2020 News post that I'll point back to if you have questions, but I do plan to make additional announcements in the coming months. These will include what will happen to the site after the comic ends, the future state of GPF Premium, and other projects (including a few GPF items!) that I plan to be working on.

Changes to our RSS Feeds: I also wanted to let you know that I've made a number of changes to our RSS feeds. (Yes, people still use RSS, including some very avid GPF fans.) My original plan with the feeds was to make an "everything" or "kitchen sink" feed that allowed subscribers to get updates on anything and everything even tangentially related to GPF, all in one place. Sadly, that plan didn't work very well. Several users have complained over the years about the feed being overwhelming or having too many entries for their feed readers to handle.

Well, I finally got of my rear and did something about it. The full details on the new feeds can be found at our new RSS hub page. (Note to users of the mobile site: This link only works on the main/desktop site for now!) However, here's a quick summary of what's changed:

• The two "everything" feeds (the main, default feed and the Premium-exclusive feed) have been broken apart into separate feeds based on content. There is now a feed just for comic updates, one for News updates, and a feed each for exclusive Premium content (Jeff's Sketchbook, the Rumor Mill, and Author's Notes updates).
• There is also a feed for my Twitter posts (@GPFJeff) for folks who are interested in what I have to say on social media but don't want to sign up for an account somewhere to just to follow me.
• All feeds are a la carte. Subscribe to what you want to follow and ignore what you don't.
• Premium-related feeds are not themselves restricted, but they do point to content that requires an active subscription to access.
• As before, all feeds point to content here on the site. None of the feeds include deep-links to images or other media.
• If you are currently subscribed to either of the old feeds, you should be automatically redirected to the main comic feed only. If your feed reader does not handle redirects, or if you would like to subscribe to additional feeds, please see the RSS hub page for the relevant links.
• If you miss this News post or just need to reach the RSS hub later, the RSS icon on the main site's sidebar now points to the hub page, rather than directly to any feed.

The Current State of our Twitter Accounts: Speaking of Twitter, as many of you who follow current events in the tech industry closely may already know, things are a bit of chaotic over there right now. A recent change in ownership has resulted in a lot of changes to rules and functionality, many of which are questionable in nature. I personally have a lot of concerns over the nature of these changes and how quickly they are being implemented, but I don't have a Scrooge McDuck sized money bin to waste on frivolous purchases of social media sites, so my opinion doesn't matter all that much.

For the moment, I don't have any plans to abandon Twitter. Our Twitter accounts will remain active for as long as I believe it is practical and prudent to keep them going. That said, this stance may change at any moment, with little to no fanfare. I will do my best to keep you guys updated on this status if and when it changes.

I will also point out that if you have any doubt about the legitimacy of any seemingly GPF-related social media accounts, always check out our Contact Us page. (Again, this link may only work on the desktop site!) Only accounts listed on this page should be considered legitimate, and any account on any service that claims to be "official" but can't be found on that page is an impostor, even if they claim to be "verified" (whatever that means in context).

Jeff Joins Mastodon: Related to the above, I (Jeff) have recently joined Mastodon, mostly as a fallback if Twitter vanishes overnight. Mastodon is a free, open-source social network server based on ActivityPub where users can follow friends and discover new ones. On Mastodon, users can publish anything they want: links, pictures, text, video. All Mastodon servers are interoperable as a federated network (users on one server can seamlessly communicate with users from another one, including non-Mastodon software that implements ActivityPub). I can be found at @gpfjeff@twit.social, if you are looking to follow me there. (And yes, that account is now listed on the Contact Us page, so it is official.) It shouldn't matter which Mastodon instance you are currently using, so long as both our servers are federated and not blocking each other. For more details on how Mastodon works, please see the link to the official site above.

That should do it for this update folks. More News is forthcoming, I promise!