[techsupporter]

According to this subthread, it's that the code is positively ancient: https://web.archive.org/web/20220225082909/http://ars.userfr...

"Like for the past 17+ years...

... I own the ISP hosting UF.

The biggest problem is supporting the legacy mod_perl stuff that the site is built on... you'd basically have to re-write the entire front end, or find a very bored perl monk to update the code base.

Basically to keep the ARS active, you'd need someone to take over the operations of the server & code. Maintaining it is a big deal.

Cost-wise, I could bring it down quite a bit if it was moved into a VPS (which we also offer), but again - it's a maintenance/care & feeding issue. This site is still running on Apache 1.3 here.

Someone would need to volunteer some senior technical skill for several weeks, and start... pretty much now."

[jasonjayr]

Oh man. We're not the only ones still running a mod_perl Apache 1.3 stack in production?!

We have a few patches against the Apache 1.3 codebase, but, yea, it's a very old stack.

[sliken]

Or just post a .tar.gz of all the comics and someone can cobble together a interface that has first, previous, next, and last comic interface.