Shout Box

Like a simple chat room, or a forum reduced to a single thread. Commonly placed on the main page of a website.

Many Web Comics don't have a large enough community to support a full-size, separate message board. A Shout Box is one way to provide easy, highly-visible interactivity.

See also The Rant.

Examples of Shout Box include:

• Alien Dice' uses one for comics and newsposts, even though it does have a forum.
• Beyond Reality has bot one of these and a forum.
• Dream Catcher uses one.
• Users of Deviant ART who subscribe have the option to put a shoutbox with any journal they post.
• Brat-halla has embedded a single, blog-powered comment thread for a similar effect.
• MYSHOUTBOX (seriously, they put it in all caps like that) is used by Juathuur.
• Tom Siddell of Gunnerkrigg Court used the home-encoded comment thread for Painting the Fourth Wall during the interim comic City Face: instead of displaying Real Life reader comments, it displayed comments from the Animated Actors and other in-universe characters reading the comic within the comic. They're archived here.
• Bear And Kitten had a very avid fanbase that actively posted in their shoutbox. Oddly enough, even though the webcomic hasn't update in almost a year now, the fans still post in the shoutbox because they actually became a close knit group of friends. Seemingly forgetting that they even came to the website for the comic.
  • Currently the site is down, but the shoutbox is still accessible via internet archive.
• Conversely, Bizarre Uprising's shoutbox has consisted primarily of complaints of They Changed It, Now It Sucks vis-a-vis the Time Skip.
• Planet Zebeth uses one as well.