User Friendly

» see userfriendly.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Every internet has its own workplace comedy and this one belonged to the English-speaking sysadmin internet. In Turkey the same humor lived in forum threads on donanimhaber rather than in a daily strip, and the running joke was about the identical subject, which is that the person who fixes computers spends most of the day explaining that the monitor is not the computer. I read English fine and I was on the right side of that joke professionally. The strip still never became a habit, the way a daily comic only does if you are already reading the site it lives on.

User Friendly started on 17 November 1997, written and drawn by J. D. Frazer under the name Illiad. It was set at Columbia Internet, a small and permanently underfunded internet service provider, and the cast were the people keeping it alive. The Chief ran the company badly, Greg took the support calls, Miranda was the systems technician who was better at the job than anyone else in the building, and Pitr was the server administrator who spoke in a fake Russian accent and plotted world domination between tickets.

The two characters that escaped the strip were not human. Dust Puppy was a small creature that had spontaneously generated inside a server out of lint and stray electricity. Erwin was an artificial intelligence written by accident in COBOL. Both of them traveled much further than the comic did, turning up as avatars and mascots in places with no idea where they had come from.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

It ran seven days a week for twelve years, which is the part that gets underrated. A daily strip is a factory. Frazer drew it in a loose and deliberately unpretty style that let him ship on schedule, and the schedule was the whole product, because a comic you read alongside your morning email has to be there every morning.

For a period it worked as a business. O'Reilly published four collections between 1999 and 2003, and the strip ran in the National Post and in Linux Journal. There was merchandise and a paid subscription tier that removed the ads. This was before Patreon and before anybody had a reliable answer for how a webcomic pays rent, and User Friendly was one of the few that had found one.

~ the trouble in 2009 ~

In 2009 readers noticed that punchlines from the strip were appearing verbatim in MetaFilter comment threads, posted there first. Frazer acknowledged it, said he had taken quotes directly from the site without attribution, apologized and pulled the affected strips while adding credits to others. It was handled about as well as that can be handled, and it still landed on a comic whose entire relationship with its audience was that it came from inside their world.

The strip went on hiatus from 1 June 2009 and never properly came back. Updates turned sporadic, then stopped. The last new strip ran on 21 November 2010, after which the site served reruns and kept doing so for eleven years without ever announcing that this was now the permanent arrangement.

~ the day it died ~

Frazer posted a notice on 26 February 2022 and userfriendly.org went dark two days after that, around midnight Pacific time on 28 February. Twenty-four years of daily strips came off the web in a single move, and the archive that had been sitting there as a free reference to an entire era of technical work went with it.

~ what got buried with it ~

The world the comic described was already gone before the site was. Columbia Internet was a small independent ISP with its own hardware and its own staff, which was an ordinary thing to be in 1997 and a nearly extinct thing to be by 2010. The jokes about tape backups and dial-up support calls stopped being observational and became historical without the strip ever changing its setting.

What made it last was not the drawing. It was that it took a job nobody wrote fiction about and treated the people doing it as the main characters rather than as the help. For a lot of readers it was the only place that ever happened.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »