RIP: UserFriendly.org

[thewayne]

The daily web comic that was a joy to web developers and computer geeks for about 12 years or so, has finally been shut down. The comic started in 1997 by Illiad, J.D. Frazer, about a Canadian ISP and the people who ran it, covering all things geek and HTTP. In 2009 updates became rather sporadic, but continued looping daily with an occasional new strip and an occasional site outage.

In late February Illiad announced on the user forums that the site would be shut down in the very near future.

Well, the very near future happened a few days ago. The site is now gone.

I had a lot of fun reading those strips, even as a looping archive. The adventures of Erwin, Pitr the wannabe evil mastermind, Miranda, Smiling Man, etc. Now all gone. I was hoping Illiad might do a Kickstarter and release the entire archive as books/PDFs, but I doubt that's going to happen.

Apparently Illiad gave a complete copy of the site to two trusted people, identities undisclosed. So there is a possibility that the site could be resurrected.

The message board, which was pretty active, has been moved to
https://hedgehog.blindambitionstudios.com/index.php?board=1.0

Comments

[thewayne]

Yeah, Penny Arcade was always a lot more miss than hit for me.  There was another strip that I really enjoyed and I can't recall the name, Torg & Bun-Bun, the rabbit with the switchblade.  But it went off the rails for me and the fun just went away.  Sadly, change is certain, progress is not.

[silveradept]

Sounds like Sluggy Freelance to me (and a quick search says yes, that's the right name.)

Change is certain, indeed.

[thewayne]

Yeah, that's the one.  I loved it years ago, but as I said, it went off the rails for me and I stopped following it a long time ago.