Club MyCE

» see club.myce.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

If you bought a CD burner in Turkey around 2002 you did not get useful documentation with it. You got a box with a bundled copy of Nero in it. The drive's actual behavior, which blank media it liked and what its real write speeds were, you had to learn from strangers. CD Freaks is where a lot of people learned it.

I was on donanimhaber and frmtr for the Turkish-language side of all this, where the hardware list in your forum signature was half the point of posting. Firmware, though, was an English-language problem. If you wanted to know whether a given drive could be reflashed into a more capable model, the answer was in a CD Freaks thread, usually one that had been running for years.

The site opened in 1999 and covered optical drives and the discs that went in them, down to individual firmware revisions and the software that drove the whole business. The forum was the larger half, and in its last years it ran on Discourse, hosted by a Dutch outfit called Communiteq.

In 2008 the management renamed it MyCE, short for My Consumer Electronics, on the theory that "cd" sounded dated and "freaks" would scare off new members. Sean, a volunteer news editor from 2003 who later ran the forum's technical side, argued against it and wrote afterwards that in two years of asking around, not one person could work out what MyCE was supposed to stand for.

~ the record ~

~ when it was cd freaks ~

The original name was accurate for about eight years. CD Freaks existed because consumer optical drives were strange hardware. Two drives carrying the same model number could behave differently depending on firmware revision, and the manufacturers published almost nothing useful about any of it.

So the knowledge lived in forum threads, assembled by people who bought blank media in bulk and tested it. That was the standard arrangement of the era for anything technical, and optical storage is one of the places it worked best, because the thing being documented was measurable. You could burn a disc, then read the error rates back off it and post the graph.

~ the sale nobody announced ~

In 2019 the manager known as JW sold the site to a company called Adireto. Up to that point JW had written most of the news personally and stayed in regular contact with the volunteer staff, none of whom were paid anything.

The new owner never introduced themselves. By Sean's account, staff spent weeks not knowing why the news had stopped, while Sean sat under an NDA waiting for a public announcement that never came, and one of the others eventually found out the site had changed hands by reading about it on a third-party site. The review team stopped reviewing. The hired news writers covered data breaches instead of storage, and the regular readers drifted off. News posting appears to have stopped in September 2021.

~ the saturday ~

Sean's reconstruction is the only account anyone has written down: with the front page dead and the forum barely moving, ad revenue fell far enough that management let the forum hosting lapse. It went offline on Saturday 25 June 2022, with no notice given, and for a while afterwards the URL answered with a Communiteq page reading "Forum Disabled".

One backup exists. Liggy, a long-running CD Freaks figure who wrote the Binflash firmware tool, pulled a copy of the forum in April 2022, two months before it went, then could not get a Discourse instance running on their own hardware to restore it from. What the surviving staff have instead is a small phpBB board where a few of them still talk.

myce.com now redirects to myce.wiki, which posts every few months and is not a wiki. The Wayback Machine holds club.myce.com from October 2009 onward, saved but not searchable, which is a different thing from having the archive.

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