Background
After Dire of TheDarkDemon and me split up working on the scene related e-mail index SCENET in the late 90s, I asked myself what to do with my spare-time. I thought and still think it’s useful to have at least one central place where most e-mail addresses of people being active in the demoscene can be found. I was also focussing on building up a link database for all sort of scene related homepages. Of course there have been a lot other archives and indexes in the web, but most of them were quite outdated. So my plan was to grab all links from there and check out if they’re still valid. Of course our links were sorted by the computer those groups were active on and of course, then by the name of the groups. By surfing around I also got hold of various other websites which weren’t mentioned anywhere. Diskmag.de was designed as a useful pool of informations. Last, but not least I began to collect download-links of video demos, also known as wild demos that I enjoyed. All you need to watch them is a video player, the computer itself doesn’t play any role anymore. Not for producing those video demos and also not to consume them.



A misleading name
The name Diskmag.de was of course misleading. The website didn’t have much to do with diskmags after all. But reading and writing english articles dealing with the scene was my hobby, simple as that. Sadly the internet destroyed the good old tradition of executable magazines on various computer systems. Only on the c64 there are regular issues of some diskmags that come out. Asking Magic of Hugi what’s up with the oldest active mag for Windows (Hugi), he told me, he skipped his job as co-editor because it was too much work. Nowadays he’s only compiling all the stuff that others have collected for Vandalism News on the c64. In former times it was Magics job to grab all sort of informations from the pc scene. And with the years that simply became too time consuming for him, Magic told me at the Revision party 2018. So there’s no active mag left on the pc anymore. Other main editors like Axel (Zine) or Unlock (PAiN) are simply too busy with their job, wife and children. And not to forget: time changed everything. Not many people are reading diskmags anymore, people prefer discussing on the Pouet board (forum), but most posts are only nonsense. Probably because I’m too oldskoolish, but I don’t want to skip 10 sides of useless postings from various sceners that only try to make a joke. I want interesting stuff. If I have to spend various hours in order to search for the one black pearl on the ground of the sea, that’s useless for me. Wasted time. Easy access to interesting stories or informations, that’s what a good diskmag should provide its readers. And that’s what a good scene related website should offer its visitors.


The end of the game
And now? Diskmag.de doesn’t exist anymore, SCENET either. In 2006 I gave all informations to Alien from Bitfellas.org. He should use my data there. Nowadays with a powerful content management system (cms) like Wordpress it’s easy to drive a website without being a master in HTML. But in the year 2000 things were quite different. Yes, there were programs like Dreamweaver helping you doing that job. But analyzing the code, it looked like spaghetti and was full of useless commands doing nothing. It somehow did work, but for a scene related website it would have been a shame to offer my visitors this overburden and mostly useless html code. What I desperately needed but I didn’t find someone, would have been a second person to code new features in HTML. And not to forget: It’s a lot more fun to maintain a project if you’re not alone. You can share your best moments and also your emotions in case you’re tired of your hobby or frustrated. That’s why there’s a team for my current website Tarnkappe.info consisting of a few people. It helps you to keep it running. Not only for a few months, it keeps it alive for years if you’ve found the right people.


Cybercrime killed the video star
Shortly before the end of our project I’ve been contacted by various people informing me that our public e-mail database would cause heavy problems. Scripts have been written meanwhile in order to gather e-mail addresses from public websites. Everybody in my list would become a victim of spammers the sooner or later. Mails informing you about new penis enlargement pills? A faked heritage, but in advance you should pay 1000 Dollars to the criminals in order to accept an inheritance? Nobody wants to get such stuff! We had two possibilities. Either to close the database which was the heart of the project and therefore that was’n an option. Or to find somebody to encrypt all e-mail addresses, so the scripts would have no chance to grab any informations from our website. But as mentioned, I didn’t succeed in my task to find a coder for Diskmag.de. Especially in the internet it is easy to find people that enjoy to criticize you. But it was impossible to find anybody that wanted to help us.

So after a few years after our opening I decided to step down and to close the gates of Diskmag.de. Better to protect the privacy of those people you care for instead of ignoring all warning signs.