I heard Brad's got a mean right hook. I reckon we should settle this the old fashioned way, and put all the custo admins in a ring with Brad, and a chainsaw.

AJC

Yeah, how professional can a guy that's called "Frogboy" be, anyway? He probably smells like cheese, too.....

paxx.. in some ways i see just what you're talking about. it's like when i was 27 and these two 19 yr. old friends got an apt. together for college. i was over one day, and they had just gotten back from this huge shopping trip to rig out their place. i was already grinning and shaking my head as i imagined their reaction to their bills a few weeks down the road. then, as i sat down before their new 25 in. tv, they informed me "we went in on the tv together - half and half!" (smiles all around.) i just grinned and shook my head some more. of course, when one of them moved out months later there was a huge fight over the tv..

my point is, with a lot of stuff they do you really do just have to shake your head and grin, knowing they must learn the hard lessons on their own. however, there are some things which are just beyond that.

if someone was printing up flyers and passing them around malls and sticking them in windshields all over town that said "mike's a crackhead," i'd do more than just shake my head at the wacky teenage hijinks. i'd try to have it stopped. and i bet pretty much any lawyer would be more than happy to help me.

i'm not sure what actually constitutes libel, especially on the net, but there are lines that can get crossed.

The debate once again goes back to what is acceptable behavior to who. rkenshen's behavior would probably be more acceptable to me if in fact he was a teenager. however, he's 21 years old. Obviously, acceptable behavior for a 21 will differ depending on each person's life experience. In my mind, this kind of stuff would be ok for a 15 or 16 year old...I had a cause at that age also. But at 21, I was married and had 2 kids, therefore I see things from a different point of view, when it comes to how a 21 year od should act.

Hum... I thought they were like 17-19...
Most of their traffic is though. I had a friend who was a kindergarden teacher, and oh boy... she drove me nuts! Hehehe! She had that juvenile attitude all the time, with everybody, as if we were all her "little friends".

Len Lampert is listed as the only contact under whois.

Yes...I, too, started out at Custo, before skinz came along...but I got there via ls.net or com, can't remember which.
It was new to me, and me being new to it, I accepted that their attitudes even back then were something to be endured for the sake of 'being included'.
Then along came skinz.org, and I jumped ship immediately, as from day one it seemed skinz wasn't a haven for the 'teenage brain-dead', and I got involved there straight off...[probably the tenth or so forum post in the first ever thread...losing touch with 'real life'[tm] from thence forward].
Sure, teething troubles made life there 'interesting', but it was never particularly 'insultingly personal' [or is that 'personally insulting'?].
eFront put an end to 'the best skinning site on the net', and for a while it looked like the skinning community had gone to hell in a hand basket.

What 'DID' happen was a splintering of the community into more diverse groups, and it seems, Custo got the 'teenage rebel without a clue' faction....

Now, this 'time-line' isn't complete, I know Deskmod and Devart for example were around before skinz' demise, but I'm sort of following my path through this.
As each and every skinning site would open its doors, I'd drop in to see how it all hung together and if nothing else, register my name for continuity's sake.
So even now, after being treated like excretia by the admins at Custo, I am still a 'member' there to protect my name and not have some puerile rug-rat register it and attempt libel and slander by name confusion.

Annoying part was that 'Jafo' was taken at Devart by some on-line gamer who has no links to skinning and/or graphic art at all....hence my 'the-Jafo' there....

Cutting to the chase, Wincustomize.com is [maturity and common decency - wise] poles apart from Customize.org, and therefore for that reason alone, my 'most comfortable place to be'....

Jafo pretty much speaks for me too on that. I can't remember how I found out about Customize.org. My UserID is in the low 3 digits even today (far lower than the admins today ). I remember what it was like and it had an edge but glenn and others did treat others with respect. The users could sometimes be obnoxiosu but the admins were good back then.

Somewhere down the line when it returned someone there got the idea to make the "man-child" types into actual admins.

I haven't figured out whether the problem in that discussion (if it can be called that) is a matter of the admins being unsophisticated thinkers or cynical spinners, but they have kept trying to spin it as a "Brad gets all mad everytime anyone criticizes WindowBlinds in any way." If I got mad everytime someone flamed WindowBlinds, I'd be mad all the time! An administrator is the official representative of a given website. And when they say things like "WindowBlinds sucks" or "Style XP is better" that's the site taking an official position.

It is painful to see how some people in that debate are trying to use moral equivalence. Trying to say that those admins are "just users who happen to have admin access." What BS. Especially given the fact that when *I* give my opinion, I'm not treated as "just some user", I'm suddenly "Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock" and apparently not entitled to opinions. Admins remarking on a news item about software on their site are supposed to be neutral observers, not cheer leaders.

One of them actually said something that pretty much sums up their whole moral structure: "People should use Style XP, not just because it's better but it's more virtuous." Those that know the background on the company that made it, and their actions will agree when I say that they deserve each other.

bizarre. if all the losers of the net got together to create a putrid black hole of hatred and uglyness then it would look something like customize.org. truly a tragedy. so who owns customize.org?

Emily,

First, most of the snotnoses in that forum wouldn't have the courage to say in person what they say under the cover of anonymity, so I don't know if the analogy is apt. But that aside, its the ignore-them-and-they'll-go-away attitude that has caused them to become what they are. They have to keep escalating their outrage until someone has to notice in order to inflate their low self esteem. Not that I think that there are unibombers in that crowd, but they are a bunch of bomb-throwers.

If Customize serves any purpose at all, it is a place where the disaffected can form a mutual admiration society, and leave the civilized alone.

craeonics sees a bonafide generation gap

If I'm not mistaken, customize is owned by revird and lamplighter, and I can't recall seeing them post anything.

Hmm, I hope that thread is still up by monday. Makes excellent work-avoiding reading material.

A good comparison to make is one between Custo and VelocityArt. VA has only been around for a relatively short space of time, but already it has established itself as a fun place to be. Just like Custo, the majority of regular visitors at VA tend to be in the younger age range, but somehow the attitudes of those people are worlds apart. The admins are friendly, laid back people who very rarely show any bias toward a particular skinnable app (Babya aside ), and yet they are actually younger than the admins at Custo. If the Custo guys want an example of a well-run site of similar size, they could do a lot worse than take a long hard look at VA.

The reasons for our concerns, and/or dislike for Custo is that like it or not, they are 'part' of the skinning 'community' and outsiders new to this whole world of Skinning and proggy manipulation will not know any different and perhaps we all will be tarred with the same brush as Custo.
"Ewk...Custo is an abhorrent society, ergo all skinners must be creeps"...
I for one do not care for that 'reputation by proxy'....