[HN Gopher] www.userfriendly.org seems to be gone, RIP Erwin, Du...
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www.userfriendly.org seems to be gone, RIP Erwin, Dust Puppy and Co
:(
Author : hougaard
Score : 125 points
Date : 2022-03-07 18:13 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.userfriendly.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.userfriendly.org)
| crb3 wrote:
| Haven't seen it in years, but I still remember naming the cat:
| "Script or Five? Which hurts less?"
| ssl232 wrote:
| Can someone explain the significance of this to HN noobs
| (apparently I'm one)?
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| .
| techsupporter wrote:
| I think you mean UF---
|
| (Does anyone remember Geek Code? Does anyone else still have
| their Geek Code .sig file?)
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I've got some old e-mails in my Yahoo mailbox with Geek
| Code in it.
| menjaprunes wrote:
| -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.1 GCS d--- s-:-
| a-- C+++ UL++++$ P+> L+++$ !E W+ !N-- o? K- w--- O!? M--
| V-- PS+++ PE-- Y+ PGP+ t- X+ R+ tv+ b++ DI D+ G e h! r++ y?
| ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
| jfim wrote:
| It was a webcomic that was popular when slashdot and kuro5hin
| were more popular. You can read more about it on wikipedia:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Friendly
| deltarholamda wrote:
| I just wandered over to Slashdot earlier today. It's sad to
| see what it has become. It's also sad to see UF burn out as
| well.
|
| I miss Ye Olde Internets.
| folkrav wrote:
| I've never really frequented Slashdot, I've taken a short
| look at it right now. What's going on with it that's so sad
| to look at? I feel like I'm missing context...
| kstrauser wrote:
| Among other things, almost all stories used to have at
| least a couple hundred comments. Today there are stories
| on the front page with less than 10.
|
| The last nail in the coffin for me was their utter
| refusal to remove absolutely abhorrent comments. Not
| stuff like "I voted for someone different than you did",
| but bullshit like https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?si
| d=11756830&cid=561389... (CW: extreme antisemitism). I
| spent a lot of time on Slashdot over the years, and had a
| 4-digit UID that I'd bust on the inevitable "who's been
| here longer?" comment chains. But while they have the
| right to allow the comments section to fill with horrid
| stuff, I don't want anything to do with that.
| oliyoung wrote:
| > at least a couple hundred comments.
|
| for context, that's when a "a couple hundred comments"
| was as big as "a couple of thousand/tens of thousands" of
| comments is now.
|
| Slashdot was the centre of the (tech) internet for a long
| time.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Definitely. Given how much smaller the Internet was at
| the time, a lot of the people actually making the
| Internet -- Linux developers, webmasters, hardware
| designers, network protocol authors, etc. -- were packed
| into that one amazing forum and debating what to do next.
| It was amazing in its heyday.
| eadmund wrote:
| That filth you linked to is scored 0, which I think means
| it is not visible by default. I think it is preferable to
| leave stuff like that available-but-hidden rather than to
| delete it altogether. Free speech is a virtue.
| morelisp wrote:
| Sustained shortage of ASCII Penis Birds over the past
| decade.
| laumars wrote:
| It was a series of comics aimed at people who work in IT. You
| might have come across some of their sketches without realising
| it.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Friendly
| MandieD wrote:
| It was often hilarious if you happened to work at a local ISP
| in the era the comic was started (late 90s), back when
| $20-30/mo for dialup was a good deal, and customers could drop
| their computers off to have their modems and Netscape installed
| and Windows configured to dial in. Or for $40 extra, have some
| high school kid working there drop by :)
| ianai wrote:
| I was one of those HS kids!
| rob74 wrote:
| Let's just say it was hilarious if you had anything to do
| with computers - I could totally relate to the story of an
| intelligent being emerging from the "primordial soup" of dust
| collected over the years in an old PC. Or that running gag
| about the guy who always managed to kill himself by falling
| into lava in any multiplayer FPS game (even those that didn't
| have lava).
| vikingerik wrote:
| User Friendly was the first big web-comic, the first to
| establish the idea of a web-comic as a primary medium, as
| opposed to being adapted from another source (newspapers) or
| intellectual property. It started in 1997 which was really
| early in Internet time, around the peak of the dial-up era (and
| the setting is a workplace of a dial-up ISP.) It may not have
| quite been the _first_ web-comic, but it was the one that first
| reached a critical mass of general notability in geek culture.
| pavlov wrote:
| Wow, one of the originals from the Precambrian era of the web.
|
| I have a vague recollection that User Friendly started publishing
| on an OS/2 Warp fan site sometime around 1995-96.
|
| (Edit: on quick googling, I'm probably wrong and confusing it
| with something else from that era.)
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| At least the original Space Jam website lives on, although I
| see they relocated it with the release of the sequel last year.
|
| https://www.spacejam.com/1996/
| pavlov wrote:
| While looking for the OS/2 site that would have hosted User
| Friendly, I found OS/2 e-Zine! whose first issue is still
| online, with the exact same HTML as in 1995:
|
| http://www.os2ezine.com/v1n1/ <FONT SIZE=+3>
| xtracto wrote:
| Part of the good old web for me: userfriendly, slashdot,
| zophar's domain, crackstore, fosi.da.ru, fravia, gamasutra...
| among several others. Those were amazing times.
| wolpoli wrote:
| There's something special about the picture of a pencil serving
| as the navigation bar for the comic.
| squarefoot wrote:
| I loved that webcomic back then, also have one of his books. Sad
| to see it go away, although there have been no new submission for
| some time. Some cartoons were quite hilarious; I had this one on
| the wall above my desk.
| https://teddit.net/pics/w:720_5tenj3387my51.png
| an_mp_speaks wrote:
| This gives me a chance to ask about a different webcomic that I
| read in the early 2000s, but have totally forgotten. It also took
| place at a small development company or ISP. There was a dog who
| was a system administrator, and he might have been in love with a
| cat? All the characters were animals, I think, and there were the
| usual 90s-early 00s Linux/Microsoft jokes.
| yayachiken wrote:
| Hackles?
|
| http://www.hackles.org/
| an_mp_speaks wrote:
| That's the one!
| yayachiken wrote:
| By the way, if you liked the old-school "ISP shenenigans
| and Unix jokes" web-comic genre, make sure to check out
| https://www.gpf-comics.com/
|
| It's still going, IMO still not stale (without going into
| spoilers: the setting really helps), even though it is also
| scheduled to wind down (tying up all loose threads) in the
| next 1-2 years.
|
| As a teen I read web-comics like GPF, Userfriendly, Sluggy
| Freelance religiously, which really helped my English and
| my nerd career. Finding out about all those big web comics
| dying is the first time that I genuinely feel in my core
| that I am getting older... :(
| hkt wrote:
| I feel older for the same reason - it sucks watching the
| internet of my youth slip away.
| kawsper wrote:
| I used to read that when I was a child, I am glad it is still
| online. I am also happy that they managed to finish the story
| :)
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Oh... I remember that. What the heck was that...
| duskwuff wrote:
| Could you be thinking of _Kevin and Kell_
| (https://www.kevinandkell.com/)? The species don't quite match
| up, but the general description and the time period do. (And
| it's still running daily strips, making it the longest-running
| web comic!)
| an_mp_speaks wrote:
| That's not it, as far as I can tell. The art in the comic I'm
| thinking of had something of an MS-Paint quality, and wasn't
| nearly as developed. But thanks for the guess! I've never
| heard of this one before.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Why now? I think there hasn't been any fresh non-forum content on
| the site for at least 12 years. Just didn't feel like paying
| hosting costs, or something else?
| techsupporter wrote:
| According to this subthread, it's that the code is positively
| ancient:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220225082909/http://ars.userfr...
|
| "Like for the past 17+ years...
|
| ... I own the ISP hosting UF.
|
| The biggest problem is supporting the legacy mod_perl stuff
| that the site is built on... you'd basically have to re-write
| the entire front end, or find a very bored perl monk to update
| the code base.
|
| Basically to keep the ARS active, you'd need someone to take
| over the operations of the server & code. Maintaining it is a
| big deal.
|
| Cost-wise, I could bring it down quite a bit if it was moved
| into a VPS (which we also offer), but again - it's a
| maintenance/care & feeding issue. This site is still running on
| Apache 1.3 here.
|
| Someone would need to volunteer some senior technical skill for
| several weeks, and start... pretty much now."
| [deleted]
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There were a number of early webcomics, with UF being among the
| more prominant.
|
| Others I recall:
|
| - "Cafe Hugo", I believe. Tagline included "vague enneui",
| possibly also "coffee, puns, ..." or something like that. Mostly
| college students / recent graduates and their life at a cafe. All
| traces seem lost.
|
| - "Westward Ho!" was a _very_ short-lived, and I think
| intentionally limited, comic about a young woman engaged in
| finding mutually-beneficial relationship and /or fighting for
| justice on the fronteir. Well executed and largely in good taste
| given the premise.
|
| - "Help Desk", featuring Ubersoft (guilty of Unholy Business
| Practices). A mention here:
| https://comics.fandom.com/wiki/Help_Desk And apparently still
| online:
| https://www.eviscerati.org/comics/hd/2022/02/unprofessional-...
|
| - Avalon High -- a very soap-opera-ish comic about students at a
| Candian high school. Archive:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20110707193859/http://www.avalon...
| Flocular wrote:
| Got announced 2 weeks ago
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220225082910/http://ars.userfr...
| shever73 wrote:
| Pity. I used to read it regularly when I was starting in web dev
| in the late 90s and it was genius (even with the Metafilter
| thing).
|
| I browsed the archive last year during the Christmas break for a
| nostalgia trip!
| phamilton wrote:
| One of my first bits of code I shared online was a scraper for
| userfriendly.org that would download every comic since the
| beginning of time.
|
| It was incredibly bad and inefficient (I didn't sleep between
| calls and just brute forced the image name which led to 90%
| 404s). Within a few days, UF announced that anyone doing wget
| scraping would get IP banned.
|
| I was just a kid, but it was so jarring to see something I did
| cause problems. I learned a ton about being a good netizen.
| Thanks UF and sorry for the trouble!
| tiernano wrote:
| I must have re-read this site multiple times over... still go
| back every now and again... looks like it is archived though.
| First post:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220225094808/http://ars.userfr...
| mattl wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220225062754/http://ars.userfr...
| tpmx wrote:
| Announced the day of the Ukraine invasion...
| mattl wrote:
| Was the writer based in Ukraine?
| danudey wrote:
| Canada (and, since 2014, Vancouver specifically).
| xtracto wrote:
| Is there archive of the comics themselves? I remember them
| fondly.
| MandieD wrote:
| The Wayback Machine has got your back:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220225092808/http://www.userfr...
| donatj wrote:
| I heard this was coming a couple weeks ago. I don't know why
| you'd shut the entire website down, rather than just put it into
| hibernation?
|
| I mean I don't know what is hosting situation is, but I can't
| imagine there's a ton of traffic on a comic that hasn't had a new
| post in years. Seems like it would be worth keeping it up just
| for old time sake.
|
| It would be reasonable enough to host the entire thing for
| probably a couple bucks a year on s3.
| matt_heimer wrote:
| Seems like it was a legacy mod_perl code base that was
| difficult to maintain.
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220225082909/http://ars.userfr...
| mauvehaus wrote:
| Because he's been posting reruns for approximately ever in
| internet time and the community has been the soul of the site
| for even longer. To be frank, it wasn't a webcomic you stuck
| with for either the art or the humor. Every now and then, there
| was a funny strip or storyline, but it's not something that
| needs to be endlessly rehashed.
|
| It seems the community has moved to another forum, so there's
| no real reason to keep posting reruns on some more-or-less
| static hibernation mode site.
|
| I hung out there sporadically for a few years and moved on. It
| was a small-ish community that was by and large friendly and
| supportive (I mean, like almost 20 years ago, can't speak for
| what it's like today). At that time, the regulars knew each
| other, at least digitally, and sometimes IRL.
|
| People may have come for the comic, but those that stayed
| stayed for the forum.
| macintux wrote:
| Anyone know when the last new comic was posted?
| olliej wrote:
| Per @oh_sigh it sounds like 12 years ago?
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| HEADS UP: We're Going Dark by Illiad 2022-02-24 11:04:32
|
| Hello all, long time. We'll be shutting down the website in the
| coming days. It may be at the end of this month. If not, it won't
| be much later than that.
|
| Many UF community members have moved over to Hedgehog, which is
| run by Klaranth. You can find the site here.
|
| All the best,
|
| Illiad
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220225062754/http://ars.userfr...
| tpoacher wrote:
| I posted some random comment there a couple of weeks ago. And
| then I went back to see if anyone replied and the site was down
| :/
| MandieD wrote:
| A webcomic that started back when mid-sized US/Canadian towns
| really did have one-stop ISPs that employed both experienced
| sysadmins, the new web designers doing sites for local
| businesses, and students just getting started in IT - and were
| places where all of the above could actually advance or at least
| enjoy their careers, not just languish as call center drones.
|
| I was lucky enough to spend a couple of summers in high school
| then after my freshman year of college working at a similar
| outfit in my hometown. It had about 1500 subscribers paying about
| $20-30/mo for dialup around 1997-99.
|
| Anyway, that's where I was introduced to User Friendly, and we'd
| laugh together over the funnier ones.
|
| Go to "Storylines" to find the ones you remember:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220225091648/http://www.userfr...
| kstrauser wrote:
| I could've written every word of this. That launched a pretty
| fun career for me.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Sad to see it go, I would read it daily even the repeats.
|
| I did buy one of the books years ago. Maybe other books were
| release since :) Will have to look
| RF_Savage wrote:
| Sad day. One of the first webcomics I just binged in a few days.
| zeruch wrote:
| I recall meeting Illiad and his coterie at one of the LinuxWorlds
| early on. A pretty affable lot they all were, and funny as hell.
| techsupporter wrote:
| I still have my "lifetime" User Friendly membership card signed
| by Illiad and "Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell, a User Friendly Guide
| to World Domination" from O'Reilly. I wish I had found a copy of
| the first UF compilation book, and that my copy of "Ten Years of
| UserFriendly.org" hadn't been destroyed in a move.
|
| For those of us who have been doing this for a very long time,
| User Friendly was the salve to the dry business side of Dilbert.
| Think the xkcd tech support cheat sheet (https://xkcd.com/627/)
| but with far more snark and characters.
| laumars wrote:
| Dilbert was a lot more generic too. I think most companies
| reflected Dilbert in one way or another. But User Friendly was
| a lot more specialised.
|
| At least that's how I remembered them.
| techsupporter wrote:
| Agreed. Dilbert was for if you worked in an office building
| doing pretty much anything. User Friendly was for a very
| specific niche of people who either worked at mid-sized ISPs
| (like MandieD wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30593421) or who
| supporter or empathized with people who worked at mid-sized
| ISPs.
|
| "Thank you for calling Columbia Internet, this is Miranda."
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| It used to be a daily visit, for me.
|
| RIP, lil' Crud Puppy, and Great Old Ones...
| [deleted]
| zem wrote:
| oh no :( i used to go back and read it every now and then. RIP.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Oh! During the .com wave they were part of my daily news round
| before getting into the office.
| teddyh wrote:
| I posted a link to there just four months ago1:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220226164056/http://ars.userfr...
|
| 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29095031
| bbatchelder wrote:
| Sad. Made me think of other sites I'd visit for similar content.
|
| The Bastard Operator from Hell (BOFH) is actually still around
| and new content being written.
|
| https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/bofh/
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(page generated 2022-03-07 23:00 UTC)