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...
I still remember reading one of the news blurbs in one issue that Linux 2.4.8 was out of beta. This was such a bizarre way to get updates about Linux.
ISPs are hit & miss. If you can get into an early-stage (W?)ISP you will get interesting work, but avoid the big established ones like the plague - there it's all about outsourcing to the lowest bidder and providing the lowest level of service they can legally get away with.
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...
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
TBH I would be interested in migrating and hosting the website at my own expense.
For others, this archive is 1997 to 2013 and is images of the strip only. I stopped reading UF around that time I think. Like many things on the web, it's only really relatable to a person for a certain period of time, before you move on (XKCD was the same, used to regularly read it, now I hardly do.)
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.
At least that’s how I remembered them.
"Thank you for calling Columbia Internet, this is Miranda."
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!
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...
- CFRH or College Roomies from Hell, still ongoing although at a much slower pace: http://www.crfh.net/
- Sabrina Online, started 1996 by Eric W. Schwartz of Amiga fame: https://www.sabrina-online.com/
- General Protection Fault, like the name suggest, this one also has an IT setting: https://www.gpf-comics.com/
- Roomies! and It's Walky! - A teen romantic comedy: http://www.itswalky.com/
- Argon Zark, this was the first web comic I discovered, seems to be going back to 1995: https://www.zark.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/20160408073302/http://sweetheart...
Oh my: "In 2014 the strip was pitched for development as a live-action television situation comedy [...]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen,_Sweetheart_of_the_Inter...
Shenanigans ensued ... for a brief but glorious time.
Kevin and Kell
User Friendly
Something*Positive
Wow, trip down memory lane here.
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.)
<FONT SIZE=+3>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.
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.
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.
"The first" might be overselling it. For example, Kevin and Kell started in 1995. This TvTropes listing [1] has some more, but oddly enough UF isn't on there so perhaps others are missing also.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WebcomicsLongRun...
I miss Ye Olde Internets.
(Does anyone remember Geek Code? Does anyone else still have their Geek Code .sig file?)
The Bastard Operator from Hell (BOFH) is actually still around and new content being written.
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!
"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."
We have a few patches against the Apache 1.3 codebase, but, yea, it's a very old stack.
I owe my career to User Friendly. It's a really sad day for me.
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.
RIP, lil' Crud Puppy, and Great Old Ones...
https://archive.org/details/linuxjournalpdfcollection/Januar...
Man. I used to read that comic every day and still pull that ANIMATED USAR FREINDLEY MOVIE every few years. Remember Slashdot?
I did buy one of the books years ago. Maybe other books were release since :) Will have to look
Convenience link: https://mega.nz/file/GKQQVbTY#1QmzfH7r2LAilAZU2RixI4yp-9IU6Q...
6000 BC: Ungh, Grrf, Booga 2000 AD: grep, awk, sed
I browsed the archive last year during the Christmas break for a nostalgia trip!
