10 years on Wincustomize

I have been a member of the skinning community for almost 1½ decade. I can proudly say that I probably have had contact with more skinnable applications than most people have ever heard of, and more skins
As it can be seen by my user number (109), I was part of the first bundle of users standing in line when Wincustomize opened the doors back in 2001.
I joined the site exactly 10 years ago to this day, March 24th.
Pre-Wincustomize I had been hanging around on the best website ever dedicated to skinning, Skinz.org aka The Brown Site.
Alot of other Wincustomize users started their skinning carreer on that site too.

Anyway, back to Wincustomize.
It's been an overall fun decade on this, the last site purely dedicated to skinning.
Off course, there are other skin-sites but they play no major part in the world of skinning.
DeviantArt? No. DevArt is not a skin-site. It's an ART site with skins.
They only started out as a "replacement" for Skinz.org, but grew into being so much more.
I "celebrated" my 10th year on DevArt back in October 2010.

After the demise of Skinz.org the whole community was in a state of turmoil - now what?
Alot of people (re-)settled on/for Customize.org, the first skin-site. Some moved on to the new big thing, DeviantArt.
Other sites to emerged, hoping to be the new Skinz.org (I guess). None have yet to succeed, imo.
Anyway, instead of settleing on just one site, I hit'em all including Wincustomize, but my "main" site ended up being Skinbase,
where I in fact ended up being head-admin for two years.
I must have done something right over there because Stardock big-man Brad Wardell had noticed me, and personally suggested me as
Wincustomize moderator to the then current Mod-crew.
I started as moderator/wizop back in September/October 2003, and have held that title now for 7½ years.

I am currently in no way as visible as the rest of the Mod-crew, for personal reasons. I stick to pure moderation and leave the user relations
to the rest. I am hard but very fair in my modding, though some artists think otherwise. I rate'em as I see'em, not looking at who made what.
We've over the years seen our fair share of ego-artists claiming foul-play when we've either rejected, low-rated or sent their precious babies to the artists Personal Page. Well.... Live with it or find something else to do.

10 years of Wincustomize...
Did we ever believe it'd ever get this far and this big? 10 years ago, yeah easily.
Doing the same today is a whole different deal. Skinning as a whole is dieing, so starting a Wincustomize sized skin-site today would, be suicidal.
Is Wincustomize doomed then? Well, nothing is forever certain, but we're not going anywhere in the foreseeable furture.
We're only usefull if we've got users who bother to visit/use the site, and we've got the best users on the interweb.
We try to do anything possible to make their daily experience on the site an enjoyable time, and I believe that we overall are doing a great job at just that.

Personally I hope to be a part of Wincustomize when we turn 20.

Happy 10th anniversary to Wincustomize and it's users!