Essentially you had a scenario that roughly went like this:
Stardock organized a contest with $10,000 in prizes.
The "anti-Stardock" crowd became very vocal and had some success convincing people that it was just a huge marketing gimmick. As if slightly increased exposore on skin sites was somehow worth $10,000 or something.
Naturally this was pretty hurtful to the people organizing it who were doing it on their own time. Myself, Pat, and others who had to spent massive hours organizing the contest on nights and weekends also had to waste countless hours negotiating with certain skin sites who wanted the rules changed (changed so that they got to unilaterally decide who got the prizes -- and bear in mind the skin sites were the ones who received half the cash so they would in effect get to decide how much money they'd receive) and threatened to quit if they didn't get them changed.
Skinz.org bowed out and Customize.org essentially stopped participating.
Naturally, Stardock, the ones putting up the money and the resources was pretty flabbergasted with the whole thing. The skin authors themselves behaved very well btw. The problems came from people who had made themselves self-appointed "leaders" of the community who had either never created skins or could barely be considered "skin authors". But what they lacked in contributions they made up for in posting lots and lots of angst on every post.
In one indident, an admin of a skin site posted on every site that I was personally going to "fix" the contest because I publicly complimented a skin author's work in a post. The quest to find bias by some people went beyond absurd.
And obviously the entire excercise became very non-fun. Especially when youc onsider the sheer amount of work we were having to do while being libeled by people sitting on the side-lines.
The contest itself was very successful. Over 130 skins were created and some truly outstanding ones were among them. There were enough categories that a wide range of authors won cash and prizes and a lot of new skin authors got involved who showed off real talent. It also had the unexpectedly good affect of bringing attention to some of the smaller skin sites.
In short, the results of the contest were good. But the only way I could see another one being done is if it could be done is if we coudl avoid all the bullshit that got thrown on us while doing it. A lot has changed since the GUI Olympics. The people who made the most noise are gone now (since they weren't really into skinning but more into personal power they've no doubt moved onto other things). And our most loyal friend and partner in the contest, deviantART, who stood by us through thick and thin, has grown to the point where other than WinCustomize, it gets more traffic than all the other skin sites combined. And Neowin, Betanews, Skinbase, and ArtUproar were also very supportive. So a future contest could be done a little bit differently where those who truly want to cooperate on a community event would be invited. I dunno, just brain storming at this point.
I like the concept of a GUI Olympics, I just don't want an event that was essentially designed as an act of good will turned into something controversal.
