I was thinking of this as a CIDU until I saw a comment at GoComics suggesting they are collecting signatures on a petition — for a candidate or for a ballot measure, we can’t say. The car does put them outdoors. Certainly there are still questions, but can we ask all to refrain from objecting to the co-occurrence of the “(Not a CIDU)” category for the LOL listing post and a stray “CIDU” categorization for the lingering doubts of this cartoon?
So it’s still snail week at BOB MANKOFF PRESENTS: SHOW ME THE FUNNY (ANIMAL EDITION).
A Sad-LOL fer shure:
Comics I Don't Understand 
The last one reminds me a little of “Puff the Magic Dragon”…
For a brief moment I thought that the secret symbol in the window might be a friendly nod to a fellow cartoonist, but then I remembered that the original title of “Phoebe-and Her Unicorn” wasn’t “Heavenly Eyeballs”, it was “Heavenly Nostrils” (for which Wayno’s example doesn’t really qualify).
P.S. I would have liked to link to a more synchronous strip, but the GoComics website is currently down, limiting the selection options:
Yes, the GoComics outage is now over 24 hours.
The tweezers are for the various rogue hairs shown.
So what sort of campaign are they doing? If the sign-up clipboard (and papers stacked on the table) are not ballot-placement petitions, are they just a public service outreach? Like Meals on Wheels? If you sign up as a geezer you can get tweezed?
I thought of them as a charity like the old man version of Toys for Tots.
Given that GoComics has been soliciting user comments toward future “improvements”, this service interruption may not be a “failure”, but rather planned maintenance. However, their track record for such improvements has been fairly low, so I really don’t expect the new site to be better than the old one.
My vote goes to Rob W. I think he deserves the Golden Tweezer award.
Still out of service as of Sunday mid-morning.
Also http://www.thefarside.com is unavailable, but that is reported as a DNS error. GoComics still has what looks like a custom message located on the site. “The requested service is temporarily unavailable. It is either overloaded or under maintenance. Please try later.”
So I’ll be the first to respond to the snail joke with this oldie:
A turtle walking in the woods is assaulted by a gang of snails. The police ask the turtle, “How many of them were there? Can you describe any of them?”
The turtle says, “I don’t know, it all happened so fast…”
(I’ll leave it to someone else to re-tell the “S-Car” joke. If you DARE.)
I figured Dilbert and The Far Side, possibly others, were down because of GoComics… possibly sharing the GC servers? (I realize GoComics stopped carrying Dilbert, but recall the homepage promoting TFS – at its own URL – pretty hard.)
@Mitch4: Yep, definitely something going on. I dug into it a bit.
Dilbert WHOIS shows:
Tech Email: @unitedmedia.com
Name Server: dns01.uclick.com
That DNS server isn’t up, http://www.uclick.com won’t resolve.
Well, unitedmedia is part of Andrews-McMeel since 2011. The A-M main site is up, and the “Syndication” link to https://www.andrewsmcmeel.com/syndication/ works, but the “SYNDICATION WEBSITE” off of that gets the error you got, as, of course, does GoComics, linked off that syndication site.
Maybe IBM was maintaining it, and they laid off the one person who knew how it worked (I wish I was joking). Or it was using Twitter as a backend (now I think I am joking).
Another case of “He’s got a tell”.
It seems intended to be a reference to “Toys for Tots” or “Kars for Kids” or “Bikes for Tykes” or similar catchy 3 word slogans for charities.
There’s a guy with a clipboard for pledging (or maybe signing up geezers), and informational brochures on the table.
GoComics is still down. Since there was no prior announcement, I suspect an upgrade planned for the maintenance window has failed and for some reason they can’t just back it out.
Both GoComics and ComicsKingdom seem to have IT departments run by Dilbert’s pointy headed boss and staffed with Wally and the Elbonians. (or perhaps you can add your favorite cartoon character to their IT staff).
I did a Google search on “Gocomics site down” and it took me to a site that checks on whether a given site is up or down. I hit the button and it said “That site is down.” Wow, was THAT useful. Anyway, I checked GoComics Facebook page (as the bastion of reliable info) and there’s nothing from the owners there, just a bunch of users asking when it’ll be back up. For me, Microsoft Outlook was out for a while, which was a bit shocking.
zbicyclist: I’m afraid most big company sites are run by Elbonians these days. It’s sad.
padraig: the point of checking on whether the site is up or down is to let you know whether it’s something related to your environment. All they can likely tell is yes/no. So while it might not have been useful to you in this instance, it is fulfilling the goal of the site. Just sayin’.
I was actually a little worried at first because I didn’t see any mention of the problem here or on the Comics Kingdom strips that I read. However, I did check an up/down site to confirm that it wasn’t working and then of course saw some confirming messages right after.
I don’t know any details of what GC might be doing in an upgrade. I know they’ve been struggling with trolls of late, which lead to the installation of a banned words list. It’s possible that it’s a victim of its own success, and not generating sufficient revenues to offset costs. Apparently it’s relatively easy to use ad blockers with the site. I’m a premium member so I wouldn’t know about that.
Hasn’t anyone posted this cheat sheet series before? (I can’t be the only guy who reads both this site and DAILY CARTOONIST, can I?)
GoComics is Down – Where to Find Your Funnies (updated)
https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2022/11/20/gocomics-is-down-where-to-find-your-funnies/
I’m not a guy, but I do read both . . .
The problem isn’t so much not being able to read the strips, it’s missing the usual gang in comments.
Got this in a Dilbert / Scott Adams email this afternoon:
Dilbert.com hacked
Confidential:
Looks as if the Dilbert.com website as well as GoComics.com — managed by the same people — were hacked on Nov 19th and hackers did such a good job they locked out the administrators from key functions.
No estimate for how long to fix. Probably was not directed at me because GoComics has lots of comics on it.
All their Facebook page says is: We’re sorry our systems are down! We’re working hard to fix the issue. We will provide a status update when available. Thank you for your patience.
Historically, when GoComics has gone down on a weekend, it has taken days to bring back up. Or at least, that’s how I remember it.
I initially tried to interpret the snails as Roman letters, which wasted a few seconds (since they aren’t).
@phsiiicidu: I’m a computer guy who’s been working from home for 2.5 years (yes, even now) so I’ve had to diagnose all my own connection problems, which have been plentiful and varied. So yeah, that’s why we check these sites, but I was hoping for a bit more info (like how long it’s been down, for one thing). So instead I had to rely on Facebook, which makes me cringe to say it.
padraig: Ah, OK, yeah. I understand;I’ve been WFH for a bit over 20 years.
https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/gocomics.com.html says it’s been down 2 days 16 hours as of this writing. That doesn’t make it definitive, of course, but it’s been down AT LEAST that long.
Interestingly, this led me down a bit of a rabbit hole, trying a couple of dozen site testers. Some were fooled by the fact that the site DOES respond; others report the 503 that it’s returning as an error. The site above is the only one I found (before getting bored) that had any kind of historical info.
I thought the first one was one of those non-profit booths promoting a support group. “That thing sprouting from your chin? No need to be ashamed or upset. We’re here for you.”
The Daily Cartoonist [which has been mentioned as having an extensive listing of where else to find various categories of GoComics content] also now has a report on Comics Kingdom, similarly giving alternate locations. At first I couldn’t understand what they are on about, as I thought CK looked pretty much okay today. But no, there is something about the updates — some strips (retro or vintage ones mostly) are showing the Monday November 21 content, but the current ones are still showing yesterday’s, designated Sunday November 20.
The few CK strips I read have today’s content, but I access them through the comicskingdom.net links that they provide for newspaper comics pages. I don’t know if that would make any difference.
However, both Gasoline Alley and Dick Tracy are stuck on Sunday. Interestingly, those are two that are on GoComics. They are available on the Tribune site if one only wanted to see today’s strip.
Thanks Brian, as of a quick check Monday evening the https://comicskingdom.com/ site itself is also caught up, and showing Monday’s content for all strips I checked.
Just tried reading gocomics for second day and like for the rest of you it was out. Did an online search –
https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2022/11/21/gocomics-down-due-to-cybersecurity-issues/
I probably should apologize for whatever went wrong with Gocomics security – this past week one thing after another I need to or want to do has gone Phlooey so I must crashed it somehow! 🙂
Including having to spend 2 hours on hold waiting to talk to IRS as apparently our 2021 partnership return which was mailed in mid March is still not there – and this is a business we keep open “just in case” to have the name – no business in well over a decade if not two. I will be filing a final return for 2022. ( I called at the end of the day to reach them 6pm NY time as the other 4 calls today did not even make it into being answered “call back later” and finally reached after 8 pm after being on hold (spoke to an employee from California). Will do what I was going to do as she said to do same also.
I checked the alternate CK feed and both Dick Tracy and Gasoline Alley skipped right over Monday and went from Sunday to Tuesday.
https://v7.comicskingdom.net/comics/Gasoline-Alley/archive/?widgetId=570
https://v7.comicskingdom.net/comics/Dick-Tracy/archive/?widgetId=570
1) This was kind of fun. I think most people will need to use there computer. This is the Friday Stars and Stripes. It’s comic section is actually a Sunday selection of strips on 8 pages). It is laid out like a regular newspaper and you have to turn pages manually (upper right corner), (or with an arrow button, 2 places). (It includes JumpStart, if you need a little incentive):
https://epub.stripes.com/?issue=SCOM_EUR_181122
Also, November 20, 2022 (Sunday) was National Absurdity Day. It has a badge logo that I feel might show up on some strips.
As I imagine others have noticed, GoComics is back. I got my Dilbert via email today for the first time in almost a week! (And it was one of his better ones.)
I was quite surprised to discover that after GC started working again, my favorite search and summary tool (http://www.comicsrss.com) picked up all the missing days without a hitch.
Me, too . . . I meant, I, too, was surprised (and gratified) that all the ‘missing’ comics appeared.
That comic is wonderful – I passed it to the two listservs for which I do comics daily.
Thanks to Kevin A for the fascinating “Stars & Stripes” link! That was very interesting.
P.S. @ Mitch – This is a second attempt to post this comment. The first time produced an otherwise blank screen with the single line “Sorry, this comment could not be posted.” I assume that it landed in Spam or even Trash.
Kilby- Sorry, no sign of a comment from you in Pending (moderation), Spam, or Trash. The error message you quote is unfamiliar, but I don’t know what it means (beyond what it says). Any chance your network connection was still getting itself established? Or from the server end, anybody else seeing glitch around that time?
@ Mitch – I wish I had thought to take a screenshot or at least copy the text verbatim, but I think that the cause of the error was that I had opened the page yesterday or the day before, and did not bother to refresh it before submitting the comment, so that the contents had probably “timed out” as far as WP was concerned.