Having already been asked what happened to the Myce forum, I thought I'll post my own thoughts and background here.
I was previously a volunteer staff member of CD Freaks (formerly Myce), initially a news editor back in 2003 and product reviewer in 2005 for the main site. CD Freaks originally covered news and reviews of optical drives (CD/DVD/Blu-ray), media, firmware, modding and software (disc burning, audio ripping, DRM circumvention, etc.) In fact, I ended up with the nickname Editor Seán, hence the name of my main blog. Later on, the site started covering consumer electronics and was renamed Myce in 2009, which stood for My Consumer Electronics. I also helped out as a forum moderator and later as a administrator (technical side) taking care of threads, forum layout, cleaning up spam and technical issues.
Back in 2019, the former manager JW sold Myce due to issues that I cannot discuss. It was bought by Adireto. Up until then, JW wrote most of the news and regularly kept in touch with staff between organising reviews to discussing ideas, such as the site direction and improvements.
Unlike JW, the new manager made no contact with any of the staff, not even to make an introduction, let alone make any public announcement. For the first few weeks after the sale, staff hadn't a clue what happened to JW and wondered why the news posting stopped. While I contacted about the sale shortly after the site was sold, I faced NDA not to discuss about it with anyone until the new manager made an announcement, which never happened. This was a terrible experience at the time between keeping it a secret and seeing staff ask what's happening. Eventually one of the staff found out about the sale through a third party site.
Before JW sold the site, everyone apart from JW were volunteers, i.e. no income. As JW previously took care of the news, the new management decided to hire news editors for the homepage. Unfortunately, they kept writing about data breaches instead of the data storage related topics the site previously focused on, so I'm not surprised by most of the regular news readers losing interest. The news appeared to have stopped September 2021, which to me was a bad sign as the forum was the only part of the site that remained barely active. The review team abandoned reviewing following the sale back in 2019, frustrated over the lack of communication from the new management, not to mention about the sale done in secrecy.
With nothing happening on the front pages at Myce and barely any activity on the forum, I reckon the ad-revenue fell to the point where the management decided to let the forum hosting expire.
It's really sad to see the loss of the forum, especially with years of technical discussions dating back to 1999. The forum appears to have gone offline on Saturday 25th, June 2022.
After JW left I only stayed for my personal stuff like Binflash (which is now open sourced) plus the firmware patches and mainly for staying in contact with the others that I know for often more than 15 years. I took a last backup of the forum in April, but when I tried to run my own discourse installation I failed to get it up and running on my equipment, so I rather setup a small phpBB instance where some of the remaining staff can now keep in touch. Wanted to send you the link to it via PM, in case you're interessted to join, but don't have permission to send PMs.
Great to hear from you Liggy. The PM restriction and first post approval basically lets me check if a new user is not a spammer, so you should be able to PM me now.
(02/07/2022, 07:33 PM)Seán Wrote: Great to hear from you Liggy. The PM restriction and first post approval basically lets me check if a new user is not a spammer, so you should be able to PM me now.
Excellent blog Sean, very glad to see you at the small forum Liggy made, we all just wanted to keep in touch, after all, we know each other for over 20 years. Great to see you there.
I'm a brand new member of this forum, and this is my first post.
I'm an old guy, nearly 80, and I used to get a lot of help from the friendly and patient volunteers on CD Freaks, back when I was learning how to burn CDs and DVDs on my hand-me-down computers.
Just recently, after a long hiatus due to health issuses, I checked back in to what they were then calling Club MyCE, to get some help getting going again on my long dormant project of backing up my DVD collection. And it was just like old times; lots of folks generous with their time and expertise responding to my query. But my failing health again sidelined me for a few days, and when I tried to log back in, I was redirected to a site telling me that the forum had been closed down.
What brought me here to Confused Bird was my Googling "What happened to Club MyCE" and I got a link to this thread.
Since you were an active member of that community, I'm wondering if you know if any of the former volunteeres are thinking of starting up a new forum to continue the great service that CD Freaks and then Club MyCE provided to clueless noobs like me?
Sean, thanks for the explanation regarding the disappearance of MYCE. I had been a member there for almost two decades. It is sad to see it end this way. I would love to know when, or if, MYCE is reconstituted somewhere else. Or a place is created for all us displaced members can join and keep the spirit of MYCE alive.
Can I say Thank You for letting me be a new member.
I was rather saddened today to see that 'MYCE' has now gone. Very Sad indeed.
I been a member of MYCE for a number of years but since my old age I did not frequent it a lot.
Always Thankfull to Liggy and Members for their Help with CDs/DVDs Firmware etc. I'm still using my old NEC3540A whilst my newer Sony gave up the Ghost.
I will try and pop in here as often as I can. THANK YOU-
Thanks all for the kind feedback and also for taking the time to register and post. It's really nice to see some familiar names / avatars again.
Sadly, it looks like the original CDFreaks / Myce forum is gone for good. The website now redirects to myce.wiki, where the forum links have been removed. The club.myce.com DNS record is also gone.
If anyone is interested in starting any CD/DVD/BD related threads here, feel free to do so and I'll set up a sub-forum to move them into. With how quiet the Myce forum was before it ceased, I can't see discussions here growing beyond what my hosting resources allows (currently around 5-10% usage).
(30/07/2022, 02:28 PM)MrScary Wrote: I DO Feed the Birds, Honest.
My favourites are the red-headed goldfinches. They look so cute through the window, but sure are feisty up-close. This is a clip I recorded a few years back:
It's also amusing watching them feed their juveniles, although so far I have not managed to film this. The juveniles lack the red head and two can be seen at the top-left / middle at the 1:45 mark. Basically, the parent would go to the feeder, then fly or walk to the nearby juvenile and feed beak to beak and repeat, like this is how you forage for food in the wild.
09/09/2022, 07:01 PM (This post was last modified: 09/09/2022, 07:02 PM by Liggy.)
(09/09/2022, 09:16 AM)Jan70 Wrote: Hi all, sad to see that the forum of myce/csfreaks is gone. I was a lurker the past years.
Check your PM for information where to find the rest of the former staff
(09/09/2022, 11:30 AM)Seán Wrote: If anyone is interested in starting any CD/DVD/BD related threads here, feel free to do so and I'll set up a sub-forum to move them into. With how quiet the Myce forum was before it ceased, I can't see discussions here growing beyond what my hosting resources allows (currently around 5-10% usage).
If you manage to get a Discourse forum up and running I could provide the backup files I have, but when I tried myself I failed to setup a forum where I could restore the backup. However I didn't spend too much time on it.
Strangely the backup from 2020 is 11 GB, while the 2022 backup is only 3 GB
I received an e-mail from another CD Freaks fan that the CDRLabs forum is worth a look as a potential alternative: http://www.cdrlabs.com/forums/
CDRLabs was an affiliate of CD Freaks and has discussions of CD/DVD/BD burners and media going back to 2002. While the forum has barely any recent activity, they continue to post storage device related news including optical media on their main site: https://www.cdrlabs.com/
For software related topics, such as DVD/BD authoring, stream ripping, codecs, etc. another forum worth checking is VideoHelp: https://forum.videohelp.com/
Hi fellas, unfortunately club.myce went down at the worst time for me, right after I asked blackened2687 for his new bdr tool to do some tests.
Now, for some reason the registration page at forum.cdrinfo.pl just gives me an error.
Has anyone contact to him, or does anyone have his new bdr tool?
The thread is here, but he hasn't been on there since June anymore https://forum.cdrinfo.pl/f29/dvrtool-v1-...dex53.html
06/11/2022, 08:51 PM (This post was last modified: 07/11/2022, 12:43 PM by czary2mary.)
(05/11/2022, 12:55 PM)Oinker Wrote: Hi fellas, unfortunately club.myce went down at the worst time for me, right after I asked blackened2687 for his new bdr tool to do some tests.
Now, for some reason the registration page at forum.cdrinfo.pl just gives me an error.
Has anyone contact to him, or does anyone have his new bdr tool?
The thread is here, but he hasn't been on there since June anymore https://forum.cdrinfo.pl/f29/dvrtool-v1-...dex53.html
I checked the registration server - you can register normally all the time. Today and every day people are registering - the last problems with registration were from 2 years ago with us .... I have no idea why you have an error - maybe some e-mail does not pass ... data, it's hard for me to say what the problem is ... Send me a screen by email - I will contact the technical people responsible for technical problems in the forum. contact Oinker My email:x
Hello, everyone. It's nice to see some of the MyCE forum members again after MyCE ceased existence. I hope you're all well and staying healthy.
Oinker - I'm sorry to hear you're unable to register at cdrinfo.pl. I'll see if the folks there can figure out the problem and help you get registered. With respect to BDRFlash, I can assure you that blackened2687 is spending all of his free time getting the first official release ready. I know he corrected a few glitches and is adding support for the latest Pioneer drives (including the recent USA versions). I will pass along your interest in the tool to him.
07/11/2022, 10:22 AM (This post was last modified: 07/11/2022, 10:37 AM by Oinker.)
(06/11/2022, 08:51 PM)czary2mary Wrote: I checked the registration server - you can register normally all the time. Today and every day people are registering - the last problems with registration were from 2 years ago with us .... I have no idea why you have an error - maybe some e-mail does not pass ... data, it's hard for me to say what the problem is ... Send me a screen by email - I will contact the technical people responsible for technical problems in the forum. contact Oinker My email: czary2mary@o2.pl
This is all I get clicking on the registration link (Firefox, Opera, Edge, all the same):
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access this resource.
(06/11/2022, 09:29 PM)jadburner Wrote: Hello, everyone. It's nice to see some of the MyCE forum members again after MyCE ceased existence. I hope you're all well and staying healthy.
Oinker - I'm sorry to hear you're unable to register at cdrinfo.pl. I'll see if the folks there can figure out the problem and help you get registered. With respect to BDRFlash, I can assure you that blackened2687 is spending all of his free time getting the first official release ready. I know he corrected a few glitches and is adding support for the latest Pioneer drives (including the recent USA versions). I will pass along your interest in the tool to him.
(06/11/2022, 08:51 PM)czary2mary Wrote: I checked the registration server - you can register normally all the time. Today and every day people are registering - the last problems with registration were from 2 years ago with us .... I have no idea why you have an error - maybe some e-mail does not pass ... data, it's hard for me to say what the problem is ... Send me a screen by email - I will contact the technical people responsible for technical problems in the forum. contact Oinker My email: czary2mary@o2.pl
This is all I get clicking on the registration link (Firefox, Opera, Edge, all the same):
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access this resource.
(06/11/2022, 09:29 PM)jadburner Wrote: Hello, everyone. It's nice to see some of the MyCE forum members again after MyCE ceased existence. I hope you're all well and staying healthy.
Oinker - I'm sorry to hear you're unable to register at cdrinfo.pl. I'll see if the folks there can figure out the problem and help you get registered. With respect to BDRFlash, I can assure you that blackened2687 is spending all of his free time getting the first official release ready. I know he corrected a few glitches and is adding support for the latest Pioneer drives (including the recent USA versions). I will pass along your interest in the tool to him.
Thanks!
Hi.
Which country and provider are you trying to open the registration page from? Everything is fine with us. Maybe your ISP is blocking or its regional settings are messing up something? I have checked a moment ago and everything is correct with us. If you have the option, check with other internet providers ?
(07/11/2022, 04:14 PM)Seán Wrote: For curiosity, I checked here (in Ireland) and the registration link gives the same "Forbidden" page as Oinker above.
It also gives the error on my phone over mobile data:
I wonder if the site's registration page is region locked to Poland.
It's really weird, especially because the forum works, it's just the registration page that gives that error.
The website now redirects to myce.wiki, where the forum links have been removed. The club.myce.com DNS record is also gone. 
