User Friendly

User Friendly is a daily webcomic about the staff of a small, fictional Internet service provider, Columbia Internet. The strip's humor tends to be centered around technology jokes and geek humour.

Drawn and authored by J. D. Frazer, a.k.a. "Illiad", it has been running since November 17, 1997. Frazer is one of the few, and first, webcomic creators successful enough to make a living as an artist. This is probably because of its being one of the first webcomics, and his targeting of a specific Web audience, which is tech related people, most of which were abundant on the Internet at the time it started.

It is remarkable for having been updated daily from when it started in 1997 until June 2009 (most webcomics are updated only a few times a week), and for having all previous strips online in the archive.

When it's being updated there is a running storyline and sometimes several days' worth of comics are drawn in advance, but the Sunday comic is always drawn for immediate release and breaks from the regular storyline. The Sunday strip is based on current events and is in full color, unlike the regular daily strips.

Periodically, there will be "nag-strips" which are special strips drawn for promotional purposes. These strips appear for 20 to 30 seconds before jumping to the daily strip. The content of these strips is to ask for donations or introduce advertisers, often presented by the characters or a cameo by Illiad.

The strip went on hiatus from June 1, 2009 to August 2009 due to personal reasons. In this period, previous strips were re-posted. A second hiatus lasted from December 1, 2009 until August 1, 2010, again due to personal reasons. New cartoons, supplied by the community as part of a competition, started to appear as of August 2, 2010. From November 1, 2010 through November 21, 2010, Illiad published a special "Remembrance Day story arc", and stated that it is "vague and at this point random" what will happen to the strip afterwards, that "going daily again is highly unlikely", but that "there are still many stories that I want to tell through UF, over time." Since then, previous strips are re-posted on a daily basis.

Read more about User FriendlyHistory, Link of The Day (LOTD), Bibliography, Recurring Themes, Plagiarism