Well, not that I generally disagree, Russ, but it's sometimes not as simple as that. First, for some non-US people it's somewhat more expensive. And secondly, some people just can't buy those toys for some reason. Parents/spouse won't allow it, whatever.
Personnaly, I had to wait till I got cash money for Christmas to buy my OD subscription. My wife would have killed me if I have withdrawn 100$ from our bank account for software we don't need. We do have two kids on a tight budget. We are saving up right now to buy a minivan and repave our driveway. There are priorities in life.

As an Australian, I paid some-what more than the $20 USD for my WinCusto CD. The point is, I'm not begrudging that in the least. I see it as yet another opportunity to put something BACK into the community. I've been around in skinning for a long time, getting a lot of enjoyment out of it, and gaining a lot of friends/experiences along the way, certainly worth the trouble/effort/time/consideration/money to put into the 'community' for what I get out of it.

On the other hand, anonymous leechers of band-width sucking data from sites such as this and giving absolutely zilch in return, not even bothering to log on to the site? Good grief.
Maybe those people who DO contribute financially by paying for the products should be protesting more loudly that they are financially supporting the free-loaders...

Just my AUS 0.02

BTW...the CD in Oz was $58.16...[equates to about 5 movie theatre tickets]...

Just a thought, but how about a time lag for non registered users, say about 5 minutes between downloads. I saw a site someplace that did that to slow folks down. I will be Registering OD for the third time here shortly since I will be just slightly out of town in December

Plainsong: I like a number of folks and it sounds like you do also download every new update on OD, be it Release, Beta or Alpha another way to put it Stable, Buggy, WoooHooo. I'm addicted, I'll admit it and I have no intention of kicking the habit

Registered ODNT, WinSTEP, as well as HoverDesk....

Do I use any of them cosistantly? No... maybe once a week or so... I registered them because they are all relatively inexpensive software packs that I enjoy playing with and I know the registration payment is helping out the developers. With the same respect, I'll only download skins that I'm really going to use.

As a registered user, it won't bother me one way or another in limiting non-registered users bandwidth usage and respect the decision of the sponsor of the site.

I agree with everything paxx said.

While to most of you 20 or 50 dollars isn't a big deal, but to some of us spending that much money on something you don't need is wasteful. sure, you can say we pay for a computer and internet which isn't totally a necessity, but for kids in high school you really do almost need a computer with internet access and for someone like me who's learning programming and graphic design for a future career.

I can understand a nag screen or something like that, but I would be really disappointed if this site were no longer available for unregistered users, or if the community was split into registered users go stardock, un regs go wincusto.

I've tried many different products but the only ones I run constantly are Windowblinds and NextStart.
However, with the price of these programs being, what I regard, relatively cheap, I am a registered user of ODNT, NextStart, HoverDesk, Talisman and a couple of Softini products.
I wholeheartedly (is that right, Jafo?) agree with the concept of Shareware and with all the hard work that goes into making these fine products, feel that a few dollars ( or English Pounds in my case) is well worth it.

Yes, Valhalla....

Most people spend a reasonable amount of money on their hobbies, and which skinning can be considered as one.
People addicted to mass-downloading, collecting squillions of skins, should be likened to any other collector. A stamp collector doesn't magically amass thousands of stamps without some form of payment. Collectors of model cars, paintings, comics, movie posters, you name it...they pay.
Food for thought....

I think bill is one the right track. I have, as well as others, talked about the old SkinzBrowser app that skinz.org had. That seems like it would be the best way if you were set on this idea.

How this could work:

For registered users - SkinzBrowser would allow unlimited downloads and access to WC features and maybe add a bit more as an incentive to register.

The question here is, what if someone has a NS/WS registration but does not have a Stardock registration? Do only Registered users of Stardock Apps get to access unlimitedly? You do also house skinz for NS/WS.

For unregistered users - Access through WC.com but would only allow for (X) amount of downloads per day and maybe limit their number of postings to the message board.

A few pros and cons:

Con: This would limit the interaction with WC and could cause it to become less popular and quickly become an elitist forum. I have seen many skinz that are by unregistered users that are fantastic. You could loose this audience from uploading their skinz here.

Pro: This could incise people to register Stardock (WinSTEP?) products for the other features that WC could have to offer on the "registered" side. It would cut down on bandwidth.

I am a registered user of HoverDesk, ODNT, WinSTEP and Talisman so this wouldn't really affect me. But like MooShoo & Paxx said, allot of this community is still under the blanket of their parent/spouses and do not have the luxury of dropping the $$$ whenever they want. Do you really want to alienate these long time faces?

0.02

That isn't the only error, Third....

Some great ideas and I pretty much feel the same as Paxx and Jafo on this.

The casual user who has downloaded a given program, visits a skin site and checks out a couple dozen different skins wouldn't be even aware of such a limit.

But the guy whose downloading hundreds of skins over months needs to contribute in some way. I think those who don't like the idea really don't understand how expensive these sites become. I would have thought that the loss of skinz.org and deskmod.com would have been wake up calls that these sites are extremely expensive. You can't justify the expense of such a site as an "advertiseing expense".

Someday bandwidth will probably be a lot cheaper and then it won't matter so much. But saying that $20 is too expensive for some guy whose downloading megs and megs of stuff is not a realistic argument. 50 megabytes is a considerable amount of bandwidth.

One thing some people dont' realize is that this site is currently a several megabits over its quota. So if the T-shirts and other goodies don't sell sufficiently to cover the difference, then we'll be looking at either having the site become massively slower due to less bandwidth available to it, getting heavy downloaders who aren't contributing to no longer be able to download, or get those who haven't contributed to contribute.

Been a registered ODNT user for what now...two years or so? Registered WB when it went 1.0 (didn't want to register beta software), got ODNT only so I could get access to WB beta, rather silly, wasn't it I equate every purchase under $AUS 100 to packets of cigarettes. ODNT has so far cost me 10 packs of Marlboro Lights 100's. I can easily live with that, for a while I'll smoke 10 a day, instead of a pack

On a serious note, I agree with Brad. Bandwidth is expensive, freeloaders should be limited in any way possible. Have download queues, a limit of MB/month or something else, as long as they don't get to run wild.

As unfair and cynical this may sound...If you can't afford something, tough, don't use it then. There's no such thing as a free lunch anywhere in this world and there won't be for quite some time yet.

Interesting statistic we found today:

Currently, the DesktopX section alone is using over 40% of the download bandwidth. 40% for just that section.

Such a system of limiting downloads on those who haven't registered could be done just on DesktopX, leaving all the other sections unaffected. It would make a good pilot program.

(as a point of reference, WindowBlinds only uses 15%).

Yep. Today, 18,000 DesktopX themes/objects will be downloaded.

Put in perspective, around 24,000 WindowBlinds skins will be downloaded. So DesktopX is definitely very popular. So the first thing we would do is simply see what % of that bandwidth is used by unregistered users. If it's only like 15% then it's not worth pursuing. But if it's 50% for instance, heck yea. Half of 40% of our bandwidth use (20% for those of you in Palm Beach) is a good chunk of bandwidth. And that's not counting the JPEG thumbnails/previews bandwidth.