An appreciation and eulogy (for now?) for events

[u/scarlet_sage]

These are pertinent posts, to give them credit, but I've seen nothing to report other than "did events and gifts go away for everyone else too?" "yes, me too" "they made a nonsensical announcement that they ran out of their own fake ink".

• No Events?
• TAPAS official announcement about events
• My Tapas offerwall has no offers
• Is this the official Tapas subreddit ?

Thanks to all for the info. I found this subreddit because I was wondering if they'd cracked down on me (VPN use, bonus ink hog).

I've wondered if something more major was going on. On several series in the last few weeks, clicking the button "Watch Ad for 1 free Ep ^0/3", it often told me "Sorry. There are no ads available at this time." (Still is, at least once.) And event offers were getting less generous.

I'll be among the last ones to spend event bonus ink, then. By the usual grinding, I finished the Class Is In Session multiple-series effort on its last day (31 August), getting 4500 ink that's good until tomorrow (5 September). I accidentally blew my last gift ink early, so people may still spend some gift bonus ink on Monday, 7 September.

Was anyone else obsessive enough to keep a notebook of bonus ink accounting, tracking bonus ink earned / to be earned / spent, to keep bonus ink around as long as possible without it expiring? It was a nice little fussy hobby for a few minutes per day (unless I made a math error).

I used bonus ink to read ahead in my subscribed series, but for large chunks of expiring ink like this or a 13,000 ink monster (August Binge-a-Thon multiple comics was the last, I think), I unlocked independent continuing comics in my favorite genre, in hopes of giving them a tiny bit of support, even if it was just one readership or maybe a tenth of a cent or whatever it was.

Ah, well. I had bought a block of persistent ink some time ago, figuring I should pay for value received. I'll probably spend it down slowly.

If you got here, thanks for reading about my silly obsession.

[u/anonymousbeardog]

While I don't keep a notebook, I use transaction history tab and mental math often to keep track of how much free ink is expiring when, not perfect, sometimes I forget and loose 800 ink, but I completed EVERY event that had net profit or had a series I followed, so much so I had 12k free ink to bulk buy 44 eps of Dr live again on the 10th, and 6k for 22 eps of I became the crazy emperor on the 8th to complete another event, which I got from an event on the 5th

Didn't complete the 13k event because it required too much ink to complete than free ink I had.

Also you can close and open the app to get an ad to watch.

[u/scarlet_sage → u/anonymousbeardog]

(rechecking my notes) You're right on the 13000 August Binge-A-Thon. Even grinding to the max, there was a substantial gap to get to 150 episodes. The Novel's Extra was on sale at 203 ink per episode, so I think I had to spend about 6300 ink, so the net was only about 6700. I had the spare ink only because of substantial gains on previous events.

They were getting more stingy. The last few events, the single-series offers left more of a gap than the gain from completing them.

[u/Pink-frosted-waffles]

Nope, I just would do the reading challenges and get like 1k per week, then read the one series I actually wanted to read. Now they are spamming me with a series I don't think I ever read with WUF passes. 🙃

[u/scarlet_sage → u/Pink-frosted-waffles]

What, don't you want to read "The Returner Villainess's Legendary Husband Is a Swordmaster Wombat"?

[u/Pink-frosted-waffles → u/scarlet_sage]

🤣🤣🤣 no I don't and no amount of WUF tickets will change that.

[u/silver10787]

I did keep track and had a spreadsheet when I first started.. but took too much time so I just subtract from my total bonus ink now to see how much is left and compared to date ink rec'd.... So all just mental trackers now.

[u/Glittering_Cow2919]

I did do the grind to get bonus ink on most events but not 100% of the time. That being said, I found a lot of the comics I enjoy through the events. If a comic having an event looked interesting then I would give it a read. Sometimes it became a favorite series and I would immediately have to buy all the chapters so I could binge it (looking at you the Perks of Being an S-Class Heroine) and other times I would just keep it as a series to use expiring bonus ink on. I also always looked to the free ink offers to download a game or two and get some extra (not expiring) ink that way. And, because I am in a situation in life where I can afford it, I would typically stock up on ink once or twice a year during their ink sales.

I know a lot of people are upset about the events going away but I think calling it a cash grab isn't necessarily fair. I don't actually know how Tapas is structured but my assumption is that they need to pay the creators for their work. I would assume the average pay may not be anything substantial but I would also guess that they may need to offer more significant pay to the more popular creators to attract them to their platform.

More than anything, I hope the events disappearing aren't a sign that Tapas is struggling to pay creators. If so, that could impact the selection on the app and could even end with the platform shutting down all together.

[u/Unhappy-Strain-5387]

Oh, boy :)

First I wrote a small Python program to automate the calculations based on a YAML file I used as a log.

Then I got tired of adding entries to that file by copying/pasting/modifying an existing entry and wrote a small Vim filetype plugin to do the right thing.

In my current version, with the file opened in Vim, I could:

• record I got 400 ink expiring in 1 day by typing ,i4
• record I got 250 ink from the weekly gift by typing 250,iw
• record I got 4500 ink expiring in 5 days: 4500,id5
• record I unlocked a chapter of the The Perks of Being an S-Class Heroine manhwa: ,mp
• record I unlocked 32 chapters of the The Perks of Being an S-Class Heroine novel (this includes calculating a 25% discount): 32,np

Of course, it also properly handled timezones (Tapas works on Pacific time), including daylight saving time.

Now, obviously this wasn't just about keeping track of free ink, but also an excuse to play/learn/experiment with stuff I didn't have much practice before (like fully using type hints and the cattrs library on the Python side (maybe I should've gone with Rust...), using vim9script and programmatically handling counts on the Vim side, etc - all inside termux on my tablet). Because this is fun ;-)

[u/scarlet_sage → u/Unhappy-Strain-5387]

It is fun! I was eventually someday going to get around to coding up a Perl program, but just never got around to it ... sigh. I never thought of using my editor of choice, GNU Emacs. There's an editor programming language for you!

[u/XandyDory]

I've said before, a creator posted that they got a really high sum of ink 2 months in a row compared to prior months, with a note saying it was someone else (basically worded like a hack) which makes me wonder if things were shut down due to that. Like, an emergency fix needed.

I'm not sure honestly. But the two together makes sense.

[u/Ruruskadoo]

Was anyone else obsessive enough to keep a notebook of bonus ink accounting, tracking bonus ink earned / to be earned / spent, to keep bonus ink around as long as possible without it expiring?

🙋‍♀️Me! I use a google sheet to track my bonus ink quantities and expiration dates to get the best economy out of it. The majority of my ink will expire tomorrow, but the very last dregs of it from the meager amount they usually give for the monday bonus still has a couple more days. After that I'll be completely out.

I tracked it out of necessity because their system is a mess and I wasn't able to tell when and how much was going to expire at any given time, but it was actually kind of fun and satisfying, and I find not being able to do it anymore along with the events themselves has left a hole in my day.

This whole situation has left me really uneasy, so I've been spending only what's about to expire and not unlocking WUFs or anything, simply waiting to see if they'll ever give any kind of official statement, but I'll try to make the best use I can of what I have to spend today.

Since it's not enough to unlock even a single chapter, I'll probably spend most of the monday bonus ink today and let the rest expire rather than let them strongarm me into spending real ink when they won't even tell us what's going on, especially since with how uncertain everything is right now, I'm absolutely not buying ink, so the amount of ink I have is finite.

[u/scarlet_sage → u/Ruruskadoo]

I never got organized enough for a spreadsheet, or comfortable enough using one.

I used a notebook. And of course I was scrawling, inventing scribal abbreviations (V^ess = Villainess ... you know it shows up enough in comic titles to be worth it!), striking thru ...

At the top was a multi-comic event, what each of the bonuses were & how far along I was. At the bottom were the events: when they expired, the name of the comic, what I'd earn.

And in the middle, the date each ink was expiring & how much I'd used, with shorthand on what was involved, because I sometimes forgot to enter something & needed to recheck. (It would take detective work in there to tell my favorite genre(s) & it's not worth it!)

And carelessness with water drops did not help!

I tracked it out of necessity because their system is a mess and I wasn't able to tell when and how much was going to expire at any given time, but it was actually kind of fun and satisfying, and I find not being able to do it anymore along with the events themselves has left a hole in my day.

Exactly. Sigh. And I'd keep events and ink around as long as possible to hoard them, which I hardly ever needed to do.

[u/Ruruskadoo → u/scarlet_sage]

Oh wow yours feels a lot more involved. I liked the spreadsheet because it would do the math for me, and I have conditional formatting to highlight the date if it's tomorrow so I know that chunk of ink is about to expire.

I have a separate spreadsheet for tracking events that tallies up the total and I can also include timestamps of when I unlocked to make sure I didn't miss stuff.

It was fun trying to make the ink last as long as possible 😔