We're going to be starting subscriptions pretty soon and those subscriptions will come with some extra goodies for those users.
As some of you are no doubt aware, running this site is becoming increasingly expensive as skinning increases in popularity. WinCustomize is now ranked in the top 7,000 most popular websites in the world by Alexa after only 1 year of being around. That translates into several TERRABYTES of bandwidth used per month.
I realize some people think that WC subscriptions should be part of their Object Desktop subscription but that just isn't possible as long as ODNT is only $50. We may look at providing some sort of Stardock.net subscription in the future for $99.95 per year that includes ODNT, WC, and Drengin but for now we'll have to have it seperate.
One of the benefits of the upcoming WC subscription will be the skin browser:
https://www.stardock.com/products/skinbrowser/sb-apr02.jpg
The Skin Browser will act as a front end to this site making it much faster to navigate and much easier to do things like chat with people on the message board, make comments, rate skins, download skins, search for skins, use suites, create suites, etc. It'll be an ongoing development product (SB 1.0, 2.0, etc.).
Other goodies of a WC subscription will include exclusive skin packs, unlimited download rights, no banner ads, etc.
We'll be working on providing additional benefits as well. We still have to figure out how much it'll cost per year to subscribe.
One thing we are not going to do regardless if have pop up banner ads on the site. We just hate them too much and with most of the Stardock staff willing to sell blood to the blood bank to keep us from having them, we're not going to have pop up ads anytime soon even for non-subscribers. So we'll have to find other ways to encourage heavy users of the site to help defray the costs of the site.
We hope to have a beta of the skin browser ready in a week or two.
