Frank Leon thinks SickPuppy has poor reading comprehension skills.

Did fb say anyone donwloading 50 megs of skins is a pirate? no.

Frank Leon loves how stardock gets compared to Microsoft because it won't put up a hoverdesk section when hoverdesk doesn't have a desktopx section on its site. The double standards are funny.

Frank, a simple clarification.

Hoverdesk.net does not house it's own skinz; they are housed by other skinz sites.

Stardock.net is not a skinz site it is their company site. Other sites house skinz for their apps as well.

When this site was started is was only to be "funded" by Stardock. As this issue continues to come up, posts have revealed that this is not the case at all and that Stardock does have a major say in WC and that any competing app will not find a home here.

Stardock pays the bills here; their decisions are understandable and valid. Correct me if I am wrong, but what seems to be the problem here is that people were led to believe that WC would be something different than what has actually become of it and they just want to be clear of that fact. To hear it from the horses mouth if you will.

As far as the 50mb a month goes if you think about it that really isn't all that difficult to do. Most of the nice DX Themes are over a Meg and actually average between 2.3 and 3.3mb per theme if you take an average of those two you get about 2.8mb. You would only need to download 15-18 DX Themes to reach that 50mb mark, if this site has about 4000,000 unique visitors a month (and who knows how many of those are new people looking at these themes for the first time) of course you are going to have people that will download 50mb a month, but over time those people will have downloaded the skinz that they like and their download percentage will become much, much less. But then the more you advertise the more new people will arrive and the cycle continues. I am sitting on DSL and it only takes me a very short time to download these very large DX Themes, and you know, that is what they are there for.

One more thing, Bob XP by Frogboy uploaded on 08/03/2001 for DX is a 6038mb download, which is more than twice a large as the average DX theme. When it was published here is was on the front page as a news item, how many people do you think out of those 400,000 unique visitors downloaded it? As of the time of this post the count was at 2889. This theme alone has used 17,443,782,000 bytes worth of bandwidth in the last 13 days. That’s 17.4 gigs used by one DX Theme.

The current top download NewXP 3 - mcs2k1 is a 602k download, released on 08/14/01, and it has already had 4361 downloads and that number keeps jumping as each minute goes by. This theme alone has used 2.6 gigs worth of bandwidth in just 2 days.

In my opinion the bandwidth problem doesn’t have much to do with the people that are downloading 50mb a month, but it has a lot more to do with the popularity and size of the skinz that are being downloaded.

0.02

.....but if they've downloaded 50 megs over the course of months, obviously they need to register it or stop using it (or at least stop using the bandwidth here).

If "nagging" people who pirate software and then download megs of skins for the pirated programs causes some of them to leave, that's an acceptable solution because fewer people is fine.

But if all that fails, I don't understand why someone would object to trying to stop people who are pirating our software and downloading many megabytes of skins. As has been pointed out, anyone downloading 50 MEGABYTES of skins isn't a casual user. A casual user wouldn't even be aware of any of this. I haven't even downloaded 50 megs of skins. But there are already thousands of people who have. And if they've at least registered the software they use, then that's great, we hope they download everything. But what about the guy who'se using a cracked copy of WindowBlinds? Why should people paying their hard earned money to register their software have to pay for the guy pirating the software and massively downloading?

Frank, those are all direct cut and paste quotes from Frogboys messages...... Even if it's not said outright, it implies that the people who are downloading excessively are using pirated/cracked versions...... I was just asking why he thinks this or makes the connection.....

Anyway, the point is not about pirating, it's about reducing / managing bandwidth. Since my previous post I have had some more thoughts on the subject.

1. Why not introduce a queuing system such as that used by www.fileplanet.com where bandwidth is constrained and people downloading have to queue, for sometimes over an hour, to get their download. This may sound daft BUT if someone is just downloading tons of skins for the sake of it, it's gonna be a huge deterent if they have to wait for hours to get them.

2. Why not introduce download quotas. Every registered user (of the site) gets 20meg of download 'space' per month. Visitors are only allowed a max of 5 downloads per visit, tracked via IP monitoring / cookies....... When you upload, as long as you have an account and the skin passes moderation, the upload KB/MB get added to your download quota. That way you either leech up to your max quota per month then wait for the next month or you have to give something to the site AND the community to be able to download more skins. Lets face it, you can't use more than one skin per program at a time so downloading hundred for the same program is stupid anyway. How many people have tons of skins they never use again, I know I used to have loads..... Now I have about 4 for most of the programs I use and if I download something new i usually junk one of the existing ones.

3. Enforce registering for downloads, or at least a members only part of the site where all the new skins and the majority of skins are kept leaving only older/or more dubious quality skins for unreg'd users.

4. I still think the moderation of submissions needs to be tightened up. How much bandwidth has been wasted by people downloading 20 versions of an XP skin to find that they're all virtually identical. Good skins are made as compact as possible to increase speed of use, dumping all the crap would free up bandwidth considerably IMO.

5. I still think the subscription thing would work as well, as long as the skins were sensibly priced and there was a 'free' area for newbies/casual honest visitors.......

Well that's it...... How about some real discussion instead of just flaming (Frank ?) The problem isn't just gonna go away and if it's not resolved then we may just lose another site to that skinning site heaven in the sky !!

Thats NOT THE ISSUE !!!

You did so Frogboy. You specifically said anyone that downloads over 2.472.814mb is obviously pirating Stardock software and they should be corralled and placed into tiny boxes and shipped to randomly picked, complete unknown strangers houses to be used as garden gnomes and other various foliage decorative type objects.

You have a garden gnome don't you Doreen. It's ok, you can admit it. P)

Buzz_Hog wishes he had an Exile button....

Just a question here that may be of no relevance to the topic at hand...

One of the reasons I purchased the WinCustomize CD a few weeks back was because it advertised two new "complete" themes by Treetog and Alexandrie. The demo pic was way too small to make out all the details, but I could make out Winamp WB and a few others. When it arrives and I elatedly load it up I discover that there is no NS skin for either one of these so called complete skin suites.

The product is now useless to me as I don't use individual skins, ever... I use NS, WB, and WA and was under the impression that complete themes would contain skins for at least those three proggies.

My question: why? Why have a section for NS on the website and advertise the CD as containing complete themes and then omit those skins.

In fact the only skins in those themes were for Stardock proggies if I remember correctly.

I tried to contact Treetog to ask if there would ever be a NS version and I received no response.

I would like to think that this was just an oversight, but it sure doesn't feel that way.

Maybe I missed it but through all the posts I lost track in reading so I'll just ask. Has or is wincustomize going to track users? If I download 50 skins right now and come back and download 50 more in 10 minutes and do that every 10 minutes for the rest of the day how will wincustomize be able to tell if i have winblinds let alone whether I have registered it?
I'm just curious is all.

Oh my god, there they come! The door! The door!

We use cameras. Stop touching yourself!

Jafo visualises flummox, sitting at the comp, sans knickers....hmmmm...skinny-skinning...