Bittersweetcandybowl.com

From Candypedia

Bittersweetcandybowl.com is the official website of Bittersweet Candy Bowl, home to the comic’s free archive and everything that has grown up around it. The whole operation is built and run by the comic’s authors, Veronica and Oliver. Veronica draws the comic, and Oliver “does all the web and print design”.[1] He has spent nearly two decades on redesigns, servers and side features.

DeviantArt origins and launch

Veronica began posting the comic on deviantART in 2006.[1] By July 2008 a simple bittersweetcandybowl.com was already live, billing itself as “your source for extended information about my comic” and updating “every week or two”.[2] The site’s own FAQ counts 2009 as the year the comic “launched as a regularly-updating webcomic on a full-fledged website”,[1] and a November 2009 “site\comic refresh” cleared out a swath of early chapters, which lingered for a while afterwards in a “Graveyard” section.[3]

Website

Project Wonderful advertisements on the site. The ad slot appeared by April 2011, and the ads came off in 2021.

The authors updated the site over and over in the early 2010s. The spring 2010 version gave every comic page its own reader comments and a helping of Veronica’s author commentary, along with RSS feeds and a store.[4] A second redesign that December added a dedicated news section and rebuilt the archive into a full chapter catalogue.[5] Project Wonderful ads were running in the sidebar by the following spring.[6] The authors released a free iPhone app in mid-2013.[7]

In June 2015, the newspost launching the Patreon campaign announced, bluntly, that “Comments are dead”.[8] Comic pages nowadays carry a “Comments from Patreon” block instead.[9] The authors added a Webtoon feed and link in 2020.[10] In May 2021, they tied the removal of homepage ads to the Patreon campaign’s success. In the same “Archive transition” newspost, they published the first 27 remastered chapters and added a “Webtoon style” vertical-scroll view for phones.[11] By the end of January 2022, the authors had uploaded all 867 remastered Omnibus pages and rewritten 74,935 words of dialogue.[12]

The site also likes to dress up for occasions. A Christmas design appears most years (the 2018 edition was a temporary skin by JUNK, with separate desktop and mobile versions), and special designs have marked both the comic’s 10th and 20th anniversaries. As a November 2019 newspost put it, “We’re feeling very nondenominationally festive over here, if you’ve noticed our site design.”[13]

As of 2026, new pages go up free at 1 PM EST every Monday, Wednesday and Friday,[1] and the navigation runs About, Archive, Extras, Candybooru, Club and Store.[14] The About page carries the cast list, author bios and FAQ,[1] while the Archive collects “154 chapters and intermissions” totalling 2,664 pages across six volumes.[15] Extras is “Links and leftovers!”, including banners and buttons for readers keen to advertise the comic.[16] Club leads to Bittersweet Club International, the Store’s wares are covered at List of current and previous merchandise, and the homepage handles Weekly Roundup signups.[14]

Servers

When the comic switched to five updates a week in 2013, the authors wrote that “the poor web server [was] pushed to its limit”.[17] In response, the Volume Three Kickstarter included a secondary goal of buying a dedicated, colocated Mac mini, with backers’ chosen designs etched onto its aluminum surface.[17] The authors finally moved the site onto its reader-funded machine in December 2015, after the old web host’s prices jumped to as much as five times what they had been.[18] The Mac mini was retired in early 2025, when the site moved to a Hetzner-hosted cloud server running OpenBSD.

Forum

The old forum topic icons, shared by the authors in 2014.[19]

The forum began as a custom message board written just for the site, and was eventually replaced by an Invision Community forum, a good deal more complicated than the thing it replaced. A Forum link was in the site’s navigation by April 2010,[4] but by September 2013 the navigation showed “Club” in its place.[20] Veronica later explained the shutdown plainly enough: managing a forum was “a pain in the ass” that “just becomes something to manage when I could be drawing comix instead”.[21]

IRC

For the better part of a decade the site also ran an official IRC channel, #bcb on irc.rizon.net, and it was the community’s home before Discord came along. By mid-2011 the homepage sidebar carried a “Chat” box with a live count of the readers currently in the room, plus a web client for anyone without an IRC program of their own.[22] The channel had its own page on the site, first at /chat.html and later at /irc.html, where the house rulebook ran to a single line: “Two rules: be civil and don’t spam.”[23] By November 2013 it was listed among the Extras links as well.[24]

After the Bittersweet Candy Bowl Discord server opened in June 2017, the two hangouts ran side by side for a few years, though the IRC page itself came to admit that “this is an older place: most readers congregate in the BCB Discord server now”.[23] The listing finally came off the Extras page in the site’s September 5, 2020 update.[25][26]

Candybooru

Candybooru is the site’s fan-art booru. It existed by December 2010, when the Extras page declared that “All the art is now found over at Candybooru”.[3] Candybooru was in the main navigation by mid-2012.[27] Veronica used to treat it “like an archive for fanart”, and it remains baked into her fan-merchandise policy: “the only requirement if you wanna make money off my cats is you post them on Candybooru >8U Them’s the rules.”[28]

Trivia

  • For years the About page’s FAQ dodged the question the whole comic runs on. “Do Mike and Lucy end up together?” was wired to a line of JavaScript that flipped the answer between “Yes.” and “No.” every few seconds, for as long as the page stayed open.[29] The Wayback Machine caught it mid-flip more than once: “Yes” in June 2011,[30] “No” that September,[29] “Yes” again by November.[31] Enough readers took whichever answer they landed on seriously that Oliver eventually retired the gag. The FAQ now says “Wouldn’t it be wonderful?”[1]
  • Long before the vertical-scroll mode, phone readers got a dedicated “Mobile Edition” viewer at bcb.im, promoted in the sidebar by April 2010.[4] The bcb.im address was soon replaced by bcb.cat, which is still the site’s short URL today. Every comic page prints its own bcb.cat link.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 “About - Bittersweet Candy Bowl”. bittersweetcandybowl.com.
  2. ↑ “Bittersweet Candy Bowl”. bittersweetcandybowl.com. Archived from the original on 2008-07-04.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 “Extras - Bittersweet Candy Bowl”. bittersweetcandybowl.com. Archived from the original on 2010-12-26.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 “Bittersweet Candy Bowl”. bittersweetcandybowl.com. Archived from the original on 2010-04-17.
  5. ↑ “Bittersweet Candy Bowl”. bittersweetcandybowl.com. Archived from the original on 2010-12-26.
  6. ↑ “Bittersweet Candy Bowl”. bittersweetcandybowl.com. Archived from the original on 2011-04-01.
  7. ↑ “BCB newspost: “The new BCB app, and Veronica at ConnectiCon 2013!””. bittersweetcandybowl.com. 2013-07-08. Archived from the original on 2013-07-13.
  8. ↑ “BCB newspost: “BCB Drawstream now live! AND OTHER STUFF””. bittersweetcandybowl.com. 2015-06-12.
  9. ↑ “BCB comic page with “Comments from Patreon” section”. bittersweetcandybowl.com. Archived from the original on 2026-05-14.
  10. ↑ “Bittersweet Candy Bowl”. bittersweetcandybowl.com. Archived from the original on 2020-12-07.
  11. ↑ “BCB newspost: “Archive transition, a new “Compare Pages” BCI member-only feature, and the lates””. bittersweetcandybowl.com. 2021-05-24. Archived from the original on 2021-07-20.
  12. ↑ “BCB newspost: “Reread BCB’s remastered chapters — they’re finally all online!””. bittersweetcandybowl.com. 2022-01-31.
  13. ↑ “BCB newspost: “”Merry Christmas, Roseville!” and a Very Special Greeting Card Offer””. bittersweetcandybowl.com. 2019-11-18. Archived from the original on 2019-12-15.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 “Bittersweet Candy Bowl homepage”. bittersweetcandybowl.com.
  15. ↑ “Archive - Bittersweet Candy Bowl”. bittersweetcandybowl.com.
  16. ↑ “Extras - Bittersweet Candy Bowl”. bittersweetcandybowl.com.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 “Bittersweet Candy Bowl Volume Three (…and more!)”. Kickstarter. 2013-11-04.
  18. ↑ “BCB newspost: “Welcome to our new server!””. bittersweetcandybowl.com. 2015-12-23. Archived from the original on 2016-01-17.
  19. ↑ “Bittersweet Candy Bowl Tumblr post”. Tumblr. 2014-08-27.
  20. ↑ “Store - Bittersweet Candy Bowl”. bittersweetcandybowl.com. Archived from the original on 2013-09-13.
  21. ↑ Veronica (2017-03-15). “Bittersweet Candy Bowl Tumblr post”. Tumblr.
  22. ↑ “Bittersweet Candy Bowl”. bittersweetcandybowl.com. Archived from the original on 2011-07-25.
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 “IRC”. bittersweetcandybowl.com. Archived from the original on 2019-08-23.
  24. ↑ “Extras”. bittersweetcandybowl.com. Archived from the original on 2013-11-21.
  25. ↑ “Extras”. bittersweetcandybowl.com. Archived from the original on 2020-08-04.
  26. ↑ “Extras”. bittersweetcandybowl.com. Archived from the original on 2020-09-27.
  27. ↑ “Archive - Bittersweet Candy Bowl”. bittersweetcandybowl.com. Archived from the original on 2012-06-11.
  28. ↑ Veronica (2025-10-24). “Bittersweet Candy Bowl Tumblr post”. Tumblr.
  29. ↑ 29.0 29.1 “About”. bittersweetcandybowl.com. Archived from the original on 2011-09-19.
  30. ↑ “About”. bittersweetcandybowl.com. Archived from the original on 2011-06-25.
  31. ↑ “About”. bittersweetcandybowl.com. Archived from the original on 2011-11-14.
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