For those who landed here looking for CDFreaks, they renamed to MyCE in 2008. So while the CD Freaks name is history, everything it contains still exists – Here’s the MyCE homepage and discussion forum.
The first thing I would like to say is that I was not involved in the name change and in fact tried hard to prevent the renaming taking place. It was very emotional to me losing the name. The main reason they changed was that the management felt that ‘cd’ was out of fashion and that they thought ‘freaks’ would scare away potential new members. The next reason was to become a website for discussions of any type of consumer electronics instead of being dedicated to storage technologies.
Well, from my experience of talking with a lot of visitors and friends over the past two years since the change, not a single person found anything negative with calling a website “CDFreaks”. When I mentioned that this is the website I take part on and that it recently renamed to “MyCE”, they looked at me saying something like “My-see-eee? That’s a weird name, what does it stand for?” or to friends that knew the former name: “CDFreaks sounded so cool, why did they change?” Not a single person I spoke to was able to figure out what “MyCE” stood for, with a few saying “Ah, so it sounds like mice and each member is a mouse.” Personally, I find that being called a CD Freak sounds better than being called a rodent. 😉
OK, the compact disc is an out-dated technology dying out, especially as a recordable disc format. So is DVD and Blu-ray recordable discs. DVD does not store very much by today’s standards and even if Blu-ray prices come down, it also doesn’t store a lot if you think about it. E.g. 2TB would require 80 BD-R’s or just two 1TB USB 2.5” HDD to back up. Who’s willing to sit in front of the PC loading 80 BD-Rs one disc after another all day? So I agree, optical disc as a recordable format is a dying technology.
So what’s the workaround for ‘CD’? Well, a good friend I know said an excellent suggestion – Get another abbreviation for CD and promote it! The example this person came up with is “Computer Drive”, e.g. mention it in the title, headings or even create a new logo to say this, e.g. “CDFreaks – World’s largest Computer Drive discussion forum.” In fact, I’d imagine for the existing member base, no one would object as long as long as the website was still called CDFreaks.
If it was called this, the website would be seen as specialised in computer drives, e.g. this would cover hard disks, solid state drives (SSDs), memory cards/readers, pen drives, other types of drives, not to mention the legacy optical drives. The term “Computer Drive” is something that will not become obsolete. This is very different to the website currently calling itself a “Consumer Electronics” website. For a newbie, they don’t know what the website specialises in since “Consumer Electronics” just means any consumer item with a circuit board and I wouldn’t be surprised if this turns many away new users.
Anyway enough with my rant. The CD Freaks name is history, bummer. 🙁
I agree whole heartedly with you