I may be a Dumb, Ignorant redneck, Brad, But I am one of the rednecks that pay your bills. So think twice before ticking off the Customers.

Cygnus, all people here should have the freedom to discuss relevant topics without having their posts ridiculed.

We delete posts here and occasionally on our news server all the time when the post clearly leaves the topic at hand and turns into an attack of the person. Or if the post is full of profanity.

I type 120+ words per minute so yes, my posts can be long. But they are long for a reason, to help ensure that my words aren't needlessly misunderstood. That said, neither I nor anyone else posting (including you) should have to wonder whether their "carefully crafted" post is going to be ridiculed. You made two posts that were very similar that both essentially were designed to ridicule my long writing style. I let one of them stay (since deleting the other would have required deleting 2 posts since you followed up your first one with another).

BTW, your last sentence in your response is something you may want to consider long. You do realize that if it were deemed that having a skin site were detrimental to the company's main business that this site would be gone. Or at the very least, the message board would be eliminated.

If people want to flame other people, then all I can suggest is that they find somewhere else to do it. We're a LOT more lax here than we are on the news server.

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.

The articles I write for Avault I always have to trim down to fit in the 10 page limit.

Now if only I could get my act together and write something sellable!

I never intended it to be an argument.
I speak well, enough to be understood, or maybe I don't, cause...obviously this is being lost on someone...

I get tired of the spiel, plain and simple.

I do not need to be Evangelized by Brad.

As the Owner of Stardock, he should have taken this issue, up...personally.

To put it frankly, I actually do not care what anyone thinks, of me, my post or my opinions.
I go to sleep at night fine. I am not eloquent, I am a RedNeck, Good Ol' Boy, Truck Driving, maniac, with enough education to be dangerous, to myself and those around me.

For the love of Cool Whip non-dairy cream topping, stop abusing commas. You're not William Shatner (and you should be thankful for that).

Hahahaha!!! Thanks Ess. That is one of my more annoyingly, bad habits.

You'd make a great philosopher. *personally* speaking I enjoy debates. A good debate is like a really good puzzle. On our news server (news://news.stardock.com) there are some great discussions that go on. And I'm not the most long winded there by a long shot. There are posts there regularly that I have to print out and read off-line because they're so long.

I wish we had more of that type of intellectual discussion here but things don't seem to work as well here. Cygnus said I am too defensive but I don't think that's so much the issue as it being more an issue of people *here* don't want to have to back up their assertions. And when I or someone else here does, it gets heated. In contrast, I can't even remember the last time there was a personal attack on the Stardock.discussion.* groups even though those discussions are debates.

I think it would be great if the message board would deal with some of the issues at hand without people getting so personal about it.

As you know, Plastic, I like you. Yet you and I are from opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to how we envision "the community". Think of all the great discussions we could have and how many new perspectives we could gain. But could we have such a conversation here without someone making a personal attack? I'm not sure. Cygnus still doesn't see the problem in him making multple posts that had nothing to do with the issue but instead "satirized" how long my posts tend to be. And I consider Cygnus to be one of the better users here. So if even a top user like Cygnus doesn't like to see debates, then I can imagine that such discussions will never really get going.

And that's unfortunate. Because Kenray's article in which he labeled DeviantArt as the only major player in the skinning community highlights how there really are two very seperate schools of thoughts on the community. The group, that I think would include you, Plastic, that thinks of it as a cottage industry in the hands of a small town (The shop around the corner crowd). And the other group, that would include me, who doesn't want to see skinning as a "Deviant" form of art but rather mainstream.

Probably another way to see it is that some people view skinning as a way to rebel against the conformity around them. An expression of personal art. Whereas I see WinCustomize as a force to try to liberate as many people as possilbe so that one day everyone decides how their computers look and feel and act.

That's why Kenray's article struck a nerve with me. We are all aware of these two schools of thought and we (WinCustomize's staff) don't like to see the quasi-official webzine of the community endorsing a particular school of thought.

Do you know what I mean? To me the community is anyone who uses skinnable software and that community numbers in the millions. To Kenray, I suspect, the community is more of a core set of a few thousand users who appreciate things like Greybook. To him, I think, a true skin site is one that supports those core users. Whereas to me, a skin site is one that serves the needs of the masses. That's why number of downloads matter to me whereas the number of skin sections matter to him. Number of overall users matter to me, diversity in app selection matters to him. I just don't think it's good for a webzine to favor one philosophy over the other.

Of course, if d a second skin magazine that targeted the mainstream more was created then that would let Tekidermy focus more on the "smallware" apps with less guilt.

You can have a good discussion here though. Just ignore all the off topic stuff.

Mig is right.
Tek is a mag for working artists. That was laid out very plainly in the "Proposal" i published before Tek even became a magazine.

We welcome John & Suzie Download with open arms, but the magazine is "for" working skinners.

Anyone notice that a young german fellah posted a note to the Deviant message forums this morning, trying to find a copy of Greybook?

To him it's still relevant, to me it's still relevant, and to Tek it's still relevant.

to quote Brad:

"To Kenray, I suspect, the community is more of a core set of a few thousand users who appreciate things like Greybook."

Almost correct.

Per my original Proposal, and per our stated goals as a magazine, the "community" we write for is those who "Create". We love and welcome those who "Use", but our magazine is for the "Creators".

from The Proposal, written and published Sept. 21, 2000:

"Proposed: the creation of a free on-line periodical dedicated to, created by, and serving the community of designers and programmers who call themselves "skinners". "

plastic: I might sound harsh but that's because I hate elitism. Any time I see elitism I respond. That started early on this site's history when Bakerstreet argued for his aristractic vision of this so called community. I'm a nobody. I've got a wife and kids and job. I don't have time to be a big personality on this skin boards. We commoners don't like being treated like we don't count. If kenray wants to have a site that caters to those elite people that's his business. but when he distorts reality to fit his vision of the universe then I do care. If his first post had just said that his magazine was for programmers and not users and what he meant was deviantart was the only skin site that gets any serious traffic that has skin sections for virtually every skinned proggie out there irrespective of its poopularity then none of this argument would have happened. I'm a lowly skin user. And lowly skin users like me see this place as the place to get the skins for the programs that most of us use.

Hey Boss!
lemme know when they are done bashing you so we can get ready for our next issue!

instead of complaining about what you read in Teknidermy, Kenray offers the opportunity for the ppl of the skinning community to even write articles/interviews for his magazine.
why not put your fingers where your mouths are???
IMHO of course
haha