Normally, the top skin authors have 3,000 downloads or so.
Yesterday, the top 3 skin authors had 17,000 downloads of their skins in a single day.
Today's stats won't be quite that impressive since we were down 6 hours due to the power outage in Livonia (the UPS's worked long enough for us to do an orderly shut down at least) but I bet the numbers are pretty high.
Mormegil's 7,120 skin downloads in a day is staggering though. Treetog getting almost 7,000 is also incredible. The community is certainly growing as fast as the bandwidth.
That said, we're almost certainly going to have to soon require accounts to download after the user has downloaded 1 megabyte of skins. This way a casual user can still try out some skins without an account but after a megabyte they'll need an account.
The skin authors who are creating these incredible things should be proud of their accomplishments.
If, for instance, Mormegil or Treetog's skins were an application, in 7 days they would have 50,000 downloads. This would make them in the top 50 most popular downloads on C-net.
In a month, 200,000 or the size of a medium sized city.
Now finally the question - are these massive download numbers due to more peopel being in the community or because the quality of skins over the past couple of years has increased? Or some other reason?