Well said, Kenray. I wish that the written word was a better form of communication than it is. I try to get around that by writing lengthy posts which apparently bother some people...
What you bring up is part of a larger issue, one that we've talked about many times here before and that is what exactly is "the community".
You like greybook, other people like Kewlpad, and still others like XCalc.
But in the final analysis, poeple who make skins, download skins, and use skins full time use only a handful of programs. Imagine, if you will, if the 1200+ WindowBlinds skins were lost. Luckily that can't happen -- we have a CD of them all afterall.
But DA only has 1/3rd as many as here. Naturally we have a lot more but your point was how much irreplacable data would be lost if something happened to DeviantArt.
If DA went down, we'd all be screwed, but few people would be affected by the loss of those Greybook skins. But what about those 179 icon packages? Is there another Windows site that has anywhere near that many complete sets of icons together? DA has around 20 to 30 (that includes eicon sets).
I consider DA to be the leader in the skinsite community because it is so well set up to serve the community of users. But in terms of actual skin content, for the things that people actually use enmasse, no one site can even compare to skinz.org yet but if you want to talk about actual content, the loss of WinC's skins would be equally catastrophic.
If it seems I overreacted, I appologize, it was not my intent. ALL my posts are very very long.
Your views touch on an issue that means much to me and the other admins here. An issue that would be interesting to discuss further if only we could keep it constructive and interesting. >
That is, the constant battle of mainstream versus fringe. To use the analogy from "You've got mail", we are the Fox books. We're the site designed to be a mainstream site that's friendly and easy to use. That has the stuff that most people want. My friend Doreen here picked it up what we were doing before anyone else -- things are more formal here, more polished. But at the same time, the "Shop around the corner" users tend to put their nose in the air (not saying you are) about it. We censor posts and profanity, we put in ratings, we have multiple access groups, we put in titles on handles, etc. In short, we don't approach it as an art, we approach it as an engineering problem. Our goal is to ensure that as many people as possible learn about skinning and are able to get the skins they are interested in.
That's why we haven't jumped on adding skin sections for every skin app out there because we know that our users don't care nor want to see all that stuff. Some major skin site needs to be able to perform the service of weeding out the apps. If we have a section for it here, it means something, it means the app has "made it". That users should check it out.
I didn't agree with Frank Leon's post in terms of his assigning motives to what you were doing in your article but surely, you can see how it does look to the casual observer. To state that only DeviantArt has the levels of activity people are used to when it is pretty apparent by just looking here that the levels of activity here. Then when you write that you said that because of your privately held view that skin sites need to conform to a very specific set of specifications to meet those requirements. A set of specifications that clearly most users do not agree with. Did you know there haven't been any new Greybook skins on DA in almost 2 months?
We all have our priorities on what matters of course. Skin authors and skin users get priority over software developers because we know that it is easier in many cases to write a program skinnable than it is to make a good skin. Our goal is to bring skinning to the masses. Others though actively dislike the mainstreaming of skinning. So to forward our goal, we do things that help make the site useful to the average user. And given the number of new users, downloads, and new skins it's working. And heck, as a skin author, I like the idea of being able to upload my skin and know the site's going to be around and that lots of people will be able to use it.
Interview Mian and Toasty some time and ask them why they think skinz.org did better than Deskmod. They'll tell you what they told me "Because we don't don't have a section for every last program out there!" Not only did they say that but I agreed with it, that's why I tended to go to Skinz.org because I only cared about a half dozen or so sections and I didn't like having to sift through a ton of sections I didn't care about.
That said, I did really enjoy the new issue of Tek. Particularly the GUI article (any color as long as it's blue).
p.s. I appologize for being so wordy. It's in my nature.
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