has myce.com gone down the tubes?

[aedipuss]

the last month there hasn't been much in the way of updates, and now the site is really old and wacky.

[TreeTops]

There are some recent posts on myce.com so it's still alive.

[johnmeyer]

I don't think their demise is something new: they've been going downhill ever since they changed the name about five years ago.

I suspect the big problem is that burning discs, which used to be a mainstay of that forum, has declined dramatically with the advent of streaming and with people watching their movies on their smartphones or directly from their cameras. Personally, I still put everything on DVD, even HD material (although I obviously keep backups of the original). It is still the most likely format to be playable in 30-40 years, so at least your heirs will be able to watch something, even if it is lower res.

[dannyboy48888]

It is still kicking, but as others have said those of us who seek out quality drives and media has dwindled so not as many folks mozy on over there.

[lordsmurf]

I don't think their demise is something new: they've been going downhill ever since they changed the name about five years ago.
I suspect the big problem is that burning discs

Even before that, CDfreaks/MyCE had a groupthink problem. It gave rise to nonsense myths like "bad batches" (meaning a few spindles, not the 100k that makes a batch), RitekG04 being "good media" (it was never good), etc. There was far too much emphasis on scanning media, when that really wasn't the primary/pragmatic way to gauge quality -- especially since home scanning wasn't all that accurate.

The person who pissed me off the most was some asshat calling himself "Dolphinius Rex" aka "The Digital Dolphin". In reality, he was a real-life younger version of The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy. Seriously. And his basis for his "CD/DVD knowledge" was burning a handful of discs so he could trade/bootleg/whatever anime at anime conventions in Canada. That's it. And people took the loudmouth seriously. He was 20s college kid, with no real-world professional media/IT experience whatsoever. And the dogpile clique groupthink mentality of the site let him act out his fantasy of being an expert.

While lots of good info was there, it was often buried under BS and excuses. Too many media apologists existed, creating kooky theories for why bad media was good. But it wasn't. And it wasn't just defending their purchases, but some of it smelled of industry shilling. After the 2009 recession, when lots of media companies went away, so did certain types of posts and posters.

I also think their non-vB upgrade lost post data, making many threads useless.

We've lost a lot of optical media stores as well, Meritline probably being the biggest one. SMS has shifted more to ink/toner, heavily diversified into non-optical products. Right now, their site is broken, bad SSL.

Optical media isn't what it once was. Sites that relied on it have failed, or are failing.

[johnmeyer]

I spent a huge amount of time trying to find the best-quality media. CD Speed (later DVD Speed) was the only tool I ever found to do these tests yourself (there was one other, but it wasn't widely used). I have found it to be an essential tool for identifying a drive that is failing, as well as determining if the latest batch of 100 DVDs is going to produce good burns.

My holy grail was to find results from independent industry testing firms. There were trade groups that did these test on CDs and DVDs. including accelerated aging tests, but you had to pay $$$ for their full results. Very early on one group did publish some of its results and the winner was a Maxell 2x DVD. It produced some excellent burns and I still have a small box of them lying around. Twenty years later the discs I burned back then still give perfect test results.

In the end, the only way I could find out which media to use was by sorting through the self-reported information at sites like CD Freaks (there were a couple of others). You had to wade through a lot of flotsam, but if you winnowed through the chaff, it was pretty useful, and is what lead me to using Taiyo-Yuden for all those years it was made in Japan. Verbatim was the other. None of these tests told me anything about longevity, since that requires accelerated aging tests, and none of us has a heat chamber to do those tests.

You then had to find a supply source that was selling the real stuff and not some fake. Mertiline seemed to be the best, and so I used them, although I had lots of problems with them. They reminded me of some of the lesser NYC mail order companies that used to publish their ads in the back of photography magazines in the 1970s: they were all pretty sleezy and were mostly selling gray market goods. Only 47th Street Photo was legit, but it took years of dealing with these other marginal outfits to figure that out.

I used Maxel 2x media for quite awhile and it was good. Some of the sites then pointed to Ritek G04 and I used that for awhile, but it was not anywhere as good as touted, and I quickly moved to the Taiyo-Yuden.

I never did find a better alternative to CD Freaks. At least people in the forums were doing actual testing, rather than just spouting opinions based on nothing. Ultimately, you have to do tests.

[Kerry56]

I noticed this thread earlier this month but was not in a position to give answers. The volunteer admins and mods over at Myce have issued a short statement today regarding the site, which you can read here: https://club.myce.com/t/old-cdfreaks-com-sites-no-longer-exist-why/404834/3

[cholla]

club.myce is no longer on the Internet.
It looks like they no longer pay their bills.

[lordsmurf]

Interesting.
The main myce.com homepage hasn't been updated in 9 months, whereas it had been getting regular updates.

This wouldn't be the first time a video related site has disappeared.

[johns0]

myce.com is still up but the forum is disabled.

[cholla]

To me the forum is the website.
I have rarely went to myce.com .
It does still work but comes up as https://myce.wiki .
There is no log in.
Instead I have used the forum club.myce.com.

[johns0]

The dvd scans at cdfreaks were very misleading,i did a scan on a dvd and it came out with excellent results but would barely play on my dvd player but another brand dvd showed poor results but played very well.

[Liggy1]

From the staff we were surprised as well when the forum was no longer available, although it was not completely unexpected, considering how much the site was neglected by the current owner. I managed to create a small self-hosted and internal forum for some former staff people, so we can at least stay in touch, however it's no place where we could continue the forum we had.

I have taken a backup of the forum on April 12th and tried to get Discourse (the forum software) running on my own server, but didn't succeed, so the old content will probably stay buried in a tar.gz archive.

It does still work but comes up as https://myce.wiki

My guess is that the owner will try to sell the myce.com domain