It is now known that the Interactive Dreams blog run by Bas is closed, and the Twitter and Facebook page accounts related to it seem to have disappeared as well.
Of course the disappearance of a CD-i website is always negative for the whole community, ALWAYS.
It is also known that we have added watermarks on all our images due to them being used without asking or any references to their origin (this site, the forum and our Facebook Group), and we weren’t the only ones asking for such as we have now figured out. Information not verified was also asked to be confirmed before published.
I predicted right after our come back in April 2019 about the possibility of the Community losing sites, with the fact of trying to be everywhere and get every day’s posts. Maintaining a website seen by most part of the Community takes a lot of personal time (time many times taken from family) and responsibilities. We (The World of CD-i) left the CD-i scene 12 years ago for some reasons not needing to be discussed again, and also for the wear and tear it gave us.
We now believe the problem is not relevant anymore. In our “team room” we discuss everything that is done on the site, we all hate the watermarks. When they were implemented, I made it clear we were going to remove them when things would become normal (about crediting). We are people of our word, and that is why we will be removing the watermarks.
This affects more than 7000 images, watermarks need to be removed one by one manually. We believe one week will be enough, but some watermarks might remain for a while as they were added directly on image editing. After the initial watermark removals, we will do our best to also restore these remaining ones.
We do not know if Interactive Dreams will come back or not, under the same or a different name, we are all sad with the loss of a reference CD-i site, but we are still worried about the credits of this site, of our work, of our time spent on it. If we have to re-implement watermarks in the future, we will not hesitate.