Tech Support Comedy

» see techcomedy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Every job produces its own folklore and almost all of it stays verbal. Tech support produced a written archive instead, and for fifteen years most of that archive lived at techcomedy.com. A former helpdesk worker who went by Hawk started the site in March 2000 as a web comic. Within months the comic was beside the point, because the reader submissions had become the site.

The taxonomy is the part I like most. There were around a dozen submission categories, one of which was End User Phrase of the Day, abbreviated EUPOTD by people who typed it often enough to need an abbreviation. Another was a library of recorded calls, filed and browsable like anything else. By the end the site was holding more than sixty thousand submissions from over nine thousand members, all of it filed and cross referenced by unpaid people.

Membership came in two tiers. Regular was free and let you post stories. Star membership went to anyone who donated, and it bought you HTML formatting in your posts along with full access to the recorded call archive. Paying a small amount of money for the right to use HTML in a forum post is one of the most 2003 sentences that can be written, and it evidently worked, because the site ran for fifteen years on donations.

In April 2015 it went down under a denial of service attack and did not come back. No mirror and no successor board. techcomedy.com returns nothing at all today, and the last good capture the Internet Archive holds is from June 2015, a front page with no idea it is the final one.

I was never tech support, but I am a computer engineer in a Turkish family, which is the unpaid version of the same job. The genre travels perfectly. What did not travel was the venue. Here the same stories went into DonanimHaber threads, mixed in among everything else, and nobody sat down to build a filing system for them. That is the whole difference between a forum where the complaints happen and a site whose entire reason for existing is the complaints.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cracks ~

A site like this depends on one person staying interested for fifteen years and on a server that same person pays for. Both are single points of failure, and the second one is much cheaper to attack. TSC was never a company. It had donations and an IRC channel on Nightstar, with moderators drawn from its own membership, which is plenty to run a community and nowhere near enough to absorb a sustained flood of traffic.

Nobody ever published who did it or why, and there is no reason to assume there was a why. By 2015 a denial of service against a small site cost almost nothing to arrange, and fifteen years of writing sat behind a hosting arrangement that had been sized for a hobby.

~ what replaced it ~

The genre did not die with the site, it moved somewhere with a bigger server behind it. Reddit's talesfromtechsupport had already existed for years when TSC fell over, and it took what was left of the audience without much friction. It does the same thing with none of the categories and none of the house voice.

The stories are still funny. The filing cabinet is gone, and so is the specific pleasure of a site that assumed you already knew what an end user was. Reddit explains itself to strangers because strangers are the traffic. TSC never had to, and that was most of the point of going there.

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