Doreen, I've been really enjoying your posts lately. They've been very philosophical and pointed. Gotta find out what you've been eating and get that recipe!
Another good discussion would be about the role of skin authors, site admins, and software developers.
All 3 are important and the knee-jerk easy path is to say all 3 are equally important. But I think that such balance only exists in theory. Right now, skin authors are the powers and we admins and developers are currently in decline in relative importance.
Custo's admins have alienated a lot of skin authors and they don't just pop up out of nowhere. Consider hteir handling of pixtudio, that lost them something like 17 new skins this month. 17! From one person/team. Not to mention all the others who lurked or were part of that.
Right now, I would say DeviantART is the leading overall community site. I say that because it encompasses all the apps and puts a lot of energy into making skin authors really feel like they're at home. While its demographic sometimes troubles me, I think the way it's actually run for the most part is something that other skin sites should emulate. Jark will tell it like he sees it and take no guff but at the same time he understands and values the people who contribute. Same for Atilla. They don't make distinctions between shareware and freeware or commercialware or whatever.
The problem is often pride gets in the way. When I say a site should emulate DA, I'm not talking about emulating it's feel or look or attitude. Each site should have its own distinct, unique feel to it. I'm talking about the nuts and bolts - site features, skin author protection.
Teknidermy might be able to help here too with some sort of skin site constitution, skin author rights, site admin rights, document.
It's really too bad Stardock's seen as an unobjective source of data on these things. We do a great deal of statistical tracking on all the skin sites (it's business afterall). We even have goofy stuff like a health index (how "healthy" a given skin site is - in our view anyway). We can tell you which days a given skin sites downloads per day stat was broken (like on DA in mid November for a few days ). Then we take these numbers and detail an overall customization health graph measured over months.
Eventually we want to provide a tool to automate this (we own the domain www.skinmetrix.com which is part of this project). Anyway, I can tell you that custo's health isn't very good which we consider bad. Remember, Stardock's goal is for ALL skin sites to be successful. We have a vested interest in custo being popular and healthy. The principle benefactor of Custo's decline has been Skinbase.org (and when LOS went down skinbase.org picked up a lot of that traffic - distribution isn't equally split up amongst sites).
Anyway, I'm babbling at this point, but skin authors are the key to a site's success right now and admins set the tone for that. The ultimate skin site in my overly biased opinion which I'm just speaking for myself here so don't blame my employer for this statement...would be a site with DeviantART's features and WinCustmize's demographics. Of course, it may be that the two are mutually exclusive. DA is possibly the most technologicaly advanced website on the net though (I really need to write an article talking about DeviantART, I don't think most people realize the features it has and Jark/Atilla probably wouldn't be comfortable advertising them because it would look like they're bragging - even though they SHOULD be bragging!).
