mr. primate... I'm really not feeling this threads you've been doing lately. They feel very alienating and melodramatic to me.
That is all.
I understand where you're coming from, but I don't agree, especially this thread. There are a lot of artists out there who have disappeared, and people really like their work, It's the same feeling that people go through when their favorite band splits up. Also, on forums, and online communities, not just relatively small ones, there's going to be members who know each other, get along well, or just think that another user is cool. When people disappear, or get perma banned or whatever, people are obviously bothered. There are artists from here, and from other sites, that seem to have just vanished off of the face of the internet, and if you really liked their stuff, it's a real shame.
Going to use thretris as an example here, he was my introduction to chiptune, I downloaded a bunch of the albums on his site and loved them, then joined 8bc. Now, thretris would disappear for months at a time, without making any blog posts or anything, but recently, he hadn't been online in more than a year or whatever, and I was dead surprised (I was delighted actually) to see that he was back, and painting gameboys again. But back to the albums, 2 of them were compilations, both of them I really liked, when I found a bunch of the artists that I listened to on those compilations on 8bc, I was amazed.
Now, fast forward to about October last year. After 8bc went down, I kinda stopped listening to chip, but for some reason I started messing around with famitracker. Anyway, I looked up a bunch of the artists that I liked from the compilations (tacticalbread, wayne1991, pixy junket and sseraac to name a few) and found out that they'd either been inactive for years, had quit making music, or just vanished. I was pretty saddened, people, although I'd never met them, had created music that I loved to listen to, and I hated the fact that they wouldn't make any more. When tacticalbread turned up on ucollective under the name lembas, I was amazed, and happy that although he was no longer making music, he was still alive, and still remembered chip.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that you get attached to people who make music that you like, or do things that you think are cool, and you get upset or whatever when they stop, and you have no idea why.
Tl;dr - rip in peace all of you who stopped making music for whatever reason.