Hi MD friends! Time for another site update.

Here's what's in store:

• Updated Web MiniDisc Pro guide
• Ongoing Getting Started guide refactoring
• Site administration updates
• The numbers!
• Thoughts on Subreddit and community growth
• What’s next

As mentioned in the previous site update, we've been hard at work reworking and updating the Web MiniDisc Pro user guide, which is one of our most popular articles. It was becoming too long, unwieldy, and intimidating to newcomers who need that information most.

So we've broken it into sections, cleaned up some language, and added new sections like Hi-MD support added in version 1.4.0. We hope it continues to be of use, and we encourage all contributions - thanks reldred for your additions on Ubuntu Snap packaged versions of Chrome!

As with the WMDpro guide, the Getting Started guide was becoming too much. It also had some wording discrepancies compared to the Buyer's Guide and was missing some important details that a MD hobbyist may benefit from knowing. The refactoring is ongoing and we really really do encourage contributions, be they typo corrections or added context or whatever else you feel may benefit the community at large.

The site infrastructure is proving to be really stable (“don't jinx it!”) but we have seen some small issues in the last few months.

One was an update to the Struct plugin, which is a really core part of the site (providing the databases) - this update broke several things and we had to manually revert to an older version until another update fixed the new error. Although stressful at the time, it was easily resolved.

The other was a good faith attempt by a very helpful contributor to change the listing pages for one device manufacturer. This edit had an error that cascaded through all of that manufacturer's pages and broke them. Although a head-scratcher for a day or two, it was found and fixed - no harm, no foul.

We continue to provide monthly-ish site backups [*] that anyone can archive, browse, or even use to create their own mirror of the wiki. We want the data and resources we've collected to always be available to anyone who would benefit.

…Jinxed it. While preparing this update, a number of AI scraper bots (“LLM training data”) started hitting the wiki's web server hard, causing high CPU usage and delayed page loads. The logs showed that these were mostly from “Clyde” and “Bytedance.” MattKC covered a very similar issue in a video months ago. [*]

Since then, we've added a robots.txt file to kindly ask AI scrapers to not overload our infrastructure. And we (finally) moved to Cloudflare for more bot protection, which should remove the need for the Captcha on every page edit. Cloudflare proxying may have introduced some issues with registration and edits, and that's being investigated.

Here are the juicy numbers of how popular the site is. These may not be interesting to anyone else, but they do reflect just how many people care about the hobby and how useful the resource is to them.

• 2172 equipment pages
• 1468 Twitter followers
• 1119 Instagram followers
• 1551 Discord members
• 10,873 Subreddit members
• 36,881 Google clicks (last 30 days)
• 7170 unique daily visitors

This is all absolutely breathtaking and I'm so thankful that so many of you are as excited about the format and the project as we are. Thank you all so much!

Sadly, a large website and associated projects cost quite a lot of money to keep online. To be transparent, here is our latest analysis of how much the site costs (in USD) to stay online and serving the MD scene:

As you can see, it's quite a lot! That's why we'd love for anyone who does benefit from the resource to contribute via Patreon or Ko-Fi and make the site not only fully self-sufficient, but also to fund the people dedicated to outreach, development, and more.

We have seen success with eBay affiliate links on wiki pages and will be expanding those, but we really really really do not ever want to run ads on the site. With your support, we'll never have to!

There is an old adage: “no good deed goes unpunished.”

YouTuber and friend of the site Techmoan is commonly cited for the rising prices of the products he features on his channel - the so called “Techmoan effect.” By making guides and data on MD “stuff” readily available, we can be blamed for rising prices too.

And as more and more people become interested in this niche part of retro tech, there is an increase in the number who participate in the community without reading our resources or respecting community guidelines, no matter how visible they are. These include asking for the Yandhi disc, for sale posts without basic information, debates about Bluetooth, direct insults, and low effort posts that ignore FAQs and guides. This information is all over the subreddit, so there is little excuse for not seeing it. It feels very similar to the "11 foot 8 bridge" which shaves the top from trucks, no matter how many flashing warning signs there are [*].

Over the months since the Reddit API meltdown, dozens of current and former subreddit moderators have been kind enough to speak with me about their struggles moderating and growing communities far larger than ours. Their key points were almost unanimous:

• Reddit has become much worse as time goes on (“Eternal September” of new users, API changes, poor leadership)
• Rules must be clearly stated and universally enforced
• Automod replies can help a little, but people who don't read rules or sticky posts won't read comments either
• If low effort or rule breaking posts aren't removed, people grow frustrated and leave or become toxic
• Some people will always say that the moderation is too strict and call mods names
• Some people are only replying for their own satisfaction and may consistently engage with low effort and rule breaking posts, or repeat replies made by others in the same thread

All of us in the subreddit, Discord, and wiki leadership truly love the format and the community that surrounds it - so much that we spend days of our lives and thousands of our dollars making resources available and as visible as Reddit allows. Sadly, posts that ignore the few rules the subreddit have slowly increased, and we try to address it in the most fair way we can: with open discussion and votes within the community before it gets out of hand.

Our next steps are to create Removal Reasons that will be added as a comment when mods remove something. We will also be updating the rules to cover more specific cases like direct rudeness or spoonfeeding requests. Of course, we'll ask for input and run polls as we did for the “for sale” rule.

We aim to keep doing what we're doing! That means fixing any issues with the proxy / caching, subreddit rules, finishing the Getting Started guide rework, as well as adding eBay links to popular equipment pages. If there are priorities we've missed, please contact us using one of the methods linked on the site front page.