from Hacker News

www.userfriendly.org seems to be gone, RIP Erwin, Dust Puppy and Co :(

by hougaard on 3/7/22, 6:13 PM with 146 comments

  • by MandieD on 3/7/22, 9:14 PM

    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...

  • by 1970-01-01 on 3/7/22, 10:51 PM

    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...

  • by bdbz on 3/7/22, 11:47 PM

    I wrote a spider many years back to download the comics and display them in a local interface.

    Somehow it survived several migrations and was on my synology.

    Here is an archive of the images if anybody wants them.

    https://mega.nz/file/GKQQVbTY#1QmzfH7r2LAilAZU2RixI4yp-9IU6Q...

    RIP UF, you were a big part of my childhood

  • by techsupporter on 3/7/22, 9:20 PM

    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.

  • by mattl on 3/7/22, 6:37 PM

  • by phamilton on 3/7/22, 10:46 PM

    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!

  • by dredmorbius on 3/7/22, 10:42 PM

    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...

  • by pavlov on 3/7/22, 9:28 PM

    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.)

  • by Flocular on 3/7/22, 9:05 PM

  • by tiernano on 3/7/22, 9:08 PM

    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...

  • by donatj on 3/7/22, 10:00 PM

    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.

  • by vhodges on 3/7/22, 11:07 PM

    I know people that worked for the company that inspired Columbia Internet (which was located on Columbia Street in New Westminster and indeed I also worked at the company they became (unrelated to the ISP stuff) for while.

    There are a Mike that was on the team I was and suspect it's the same guy as 'Myke'. The person hosting ufies.org is a friend and former colleague from the same company as well.

  • by ssl232 on 3/7/22, 9:03 PM

    Can someone explain the significance of this to HN noobs (apparently I'm one)?

  • by bbatchelder on 3/7/22, 9:53 PM

    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/

  • by mindcrime on 3/8/22, 3:50 AM

    It's a sad day. Truly the "end of an era". Although really, I guess the original "era" ended when Illiad stopped writing new UF episodes. But still, for the site to go down really puts the exclamation point on it.

    RIP User Friendly.

    But hey, at least Sluggy Freelance seems to still be alive and kicking. I really need to go back and catch up on that series. Maybe time to start over from the beginning and re-read the entire thing. What an adventure that would be!

  • by an_mp_speaks on 3/7/22, 9:29 PM

    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.

  • by oh_sigh on 3/7/22, 9:30 PM

    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?

  • by kethryvis on 3/8/22, 6:30 AM

    User Friendly is why i am where i am today. It's why i got the degree i did, why i have the career i have, why i have the viewpoints on that career i had today.

    I owe my career to User Friendly. It's a really sad day for me.

  • by LambdaComplex on 3/8/22, 3:28 AM

    Quake 3 Arena (from 1999) has a Dust Puppy easter egg: https://eeggs.com/items/4693.html

  • by smudgy on 3/7/22, 11:46 PM

    Freshmeat nostalgia and Userfriendly going dark on the same day.

    I'm so damn old...

    I just found out today that Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda rebooted Geeks in Space (a while back, it seems). Rob, Jeff and CowboyNeal's original run of GIS was one the first podcasts I ever listened to and it was glorious.

  • by ChrisMarshallNY on 3/7/22, 8:56 PM

    It used to be a daily visit, for me.

    RIP, lil' Crud Puppy, and Great Old Ones...

  • by teddyh on 3/7/22, 9:52 PM

  • by squarefoot on 3/7/22, 9:55 PM

    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

  • by vax10 on 3/8/22, 1:19 AM

    This gives me a real sense of the past, I always looked forward to the comic strip in Linux Journal Magazine

    https://archive.org/details/linuxjournalpdfcollection/Januar...

  • by stuntkite on 3/9/22, 5:15 PM

    Oh no! My Windows has crashed! You need Loonix! Loonix is more reliable than crappy Windows.

    Man. I used to read that comic every day and still pull that ANIMATED USAR FREINDLEY MOVIE every few years. Remember Slashdot?

  • by xtracto on 3/7/22, 9:36 PM

    Is there archive of the comics themselves? I remember them fondly.

  • by jasoneckert on 3/8/22, 1:43 AM

    We can only assume that the Web server has been eaten by a grue.

  • by jmclnx on 3/7/22, 9:16 PM

    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

  • by tpoacher on 3/7/22, 10:51 PM

    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 :/

  • by raesene9 on 3/8/22, 10:19 AM

    Shame to see it go, I still have my Dust Puppy on the shelf and a signed User Friendly card, I got back at a conf. in the 90's.

  • by zeruch on 3/7/22, 9:46 PM

    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.

  • by macintux on 3/7/22, 9:37 PM

    Anyone know when the last new comic was posted?

  • by novok on 3/7/22, 11:25 PM

    Since UF is now over, is there a book / compiled archive of the comic that isn't a wayback machine copy?

  • by crb3 on 3/7/22, 9:54 PM

    Haven't seen it in years, but I still remember naming the cat: "Script or Five? Which hurts less?"

  • by wolpoli on 3/7/22, 10:39 PM

    There's something special about the picture of a pencil serving as the navigation bar for the comic.

  • by pjmlp on 3/7/22, 9:52 PM

    Oh! During the .com wave they were part of my daily news round before getting into the office.

  • by reiichiroh on 3/9/22, 10:46 PM

    Good riddance finally. Almost as ugly as Mega Tokyo comic strip.

  • by RF_Savage on 3/7/22, 9:43 PM

    Sad day. One of the first webcomics I just binged in a few days.

  • by bouncycastle on 3/8/22, 3:43 AM

    My fav cartoon:

    6000 BC: Ungh, Grrf, Booga 2000 AD: grep, awk, sed

  • by carlospwk on 3/8/22, 6:16 AM

    Damn. RIP, lots of laughs a long time ago.

  • by geocrasher on 3/8/22, 2:05 AM

    Ebbeh!!

  • by zem on 3/7/22, 8:58 PM

    oh no :( i used to go back and read it every now and then. RIP.

  • by shever73 on 3/7/22, 9:32 PM

    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!