Crae has some good points.
Naivete isn't restricted to just some skinners. I'm naive too.
After what happened with Skinz.org with eFront, we decided that when we put up WinCustomize we would put everything on view. No secrets.
We'd let users know how many visitors the site gets. Where they come from. How much bandwidth is used. How that bandwidth is distributed. How much the site costs. What ideas we had for the site. Get people's input on directions for the site.
And of course, the result has been somewhat disastrous. You'd think we were now charging users to download. I'm a slow learner (as T-man would say). I'll put out an idea to see what people think and expect some constructive discussion. Afterall, that's what we do in the Stardock groups all the time. We had a discussion on price increases for Object Desktop for instance there. Price INCREASES mind you. Not one flame. Not one melodramatic crazed response from anyone.
So what causes this difference? The problem is that we're used to people trusting us. And for whatever reason, the skin "community" just doesn't want to trust any companies no matter how benevolent they are. So I'll put out an idea to get views and suddenly histerical responses will be made as if such an idea was not only goin gto be implemented, but had already been implemented.
Whereas on the Stardock news groups, our users trust us. They know from years of experience that we do care what people say and do take what they think into consideration. The software we've created wasn't designed soley by some tiny group of Stardock engineers but by our community of users.
But in the skinning "community" you have a decent chunk of users reading everything we say as new evil ways we're out to screw the little guy.
That's the naivete that we really have to get over. That there will always be some vocal percentage of users who will believe the worst no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary.
And hence, instead of having gropus of rational people trying to solve a problem (we have X bandwidth but Y bandwidth is being used where Y is greater than X, we need to find a way of either increasing X or decreasing Y) it's a bucnh of unconstructive shooting down of ideas and vague, pie in the sky "everything should be free and corporations are evil" mush.
So clearly, the solution is to discuss iddeas for the site on the news groups if we want constructive suggestions and simply implement them here. And to blow off discussions (We could have just blown off the Hoverdesk question and it would have died. So answering honestly and openly suddenly makes WC the "bad guy".
Ultimately, we will never have 1 vision of "the community". I don't think of "the community" as the 2 dozen active posters on a couple of websites. The 400,000 unique visitors to this site are nominally part of the community. Even if 99% of them are discounted, that's still 4,000 people. They are part of the community in my view. Economics, politics, whatever have nothing to do with "the community". In my view, "the skinning community" is made up of people who, for whatever reason, choose to spend their time creating or using skins.
BTW, for those of you who chaffe at long posts (another unique issue to "the community") this post would be considered short in other discussion groups.
But I'm sure there's a "What song are you listening to right now" post waiting another response somewhere...
