Blog: So what kind of community do you want?
Some late Spring thoughts on WinCustomize.com
Monday, June 12, 2006 by Frogboy | Discussion: WinCustomize News
Summer approaches and June is when we start to put together all our plans for the next year. It is traditionally the slowest time of the year as people go outside and find other things to do. Things start to get interesting again usually around August. Right now we're working on a new website for Stardock then the same team will start to re-skin WinCustomize.com. Our hope is to make it so that user swill be able to eventually skin the site themselves (or at least WC subscribers).
We're going to have to make some tough decisions on what skin sections to highlight and which ones to not be on by default. If you look closely on the skin gallery list on the left, you'll see a little wrench thing. If you click on it, you can control which skin galleries appear by default and which ones don't. So users can already control this. But some galleries are clearly on the way out.
It's a time of change for our community. The community grows and as it grows, new people come in with their own ideas and preferences. Old favorites like Litestep (for instance) start to fade away. Litestep is likely to stop being a default gallery shortly. What about Winamp and for that matter, the entire "skinned" media player movement. What's the future of that? Gadgets and widgets have taken some of the wind out of those things.
Another long-argued issue in the skinning community revolves around fair-use and copyrights. WinCustomize.com has long had, by far, the strictest rules on copyright of any major skin site. We've tried to protect people's copyrights very aggressively. But at the same time, we want users to be able to share and download things that they want. This site doesn't exist in a vacuum. Our friends at deviantART have over 22 million items in their galleries. It's a different kind of site from WinCustomize so it's not quite an apples and apples comparison. But they don't have moderation. So we try to find a happy middle ground where rips and such are quickly removed but at the same time we allow fan art.
I've written a post here that outlines our policy in more detail with regards to copyright, fair use, and rips.
Going forward, skinning is going to become much more popular than it is even today. And this year, our job is to fix up and enhance the infrastructure we have on WinCustomize.com to deal with what is almost certainly going to be an unprecedented level of traffic when Windows Vista comes on the scene. With so many new galleries, new software, and new users, we need to start thinking about -- all of us -- what kind of community we want to be.
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Reply #22 Tuesday, June 13, 2006 9:12 AM
And my specs are not that old. 
Reply #23 Tuesday, June 13, 2006 9:19 AM
| Wrench,what wrench.I've been all over the page and I'm damned if I can see it |
Home Page > Gallery vertical bar > right-side of bar: "Do you see a small white square icon of an open-end wrench head"? 
Reply #24 Tuesday, June 13, 2006 9:19 AM
| Gallery vertical bar |
Oops, make that "horizontal bar".
Reply #25 Tuesday, June 13, 2006 10:45 AM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanner
Reply #26 Tuesday, June 13, 2006 1:08 PM
| Jafo : Fairyy~ ....don't forget...I'm the Number One Fan of Litestep here...yet agree it should probably not be frontpage....so it's not like I'm inconsistent. Both have their place...but neither is as significant as [the current appeal for] Windowblinds, or...who knows what will be new and exciting with the advent of Vista, etc.... |
I understand your point - there is only room for so much. I was just thinking how many people i've seen start out doing just screen shots - then start a little modifying - then go off to create awesome windowblinds , walls, etc .
I was thinking it might be time to pry Litestep off your computer
Reply #27 Tuesday, June 13, 2006 1:12 PM
| Home Page > Gallery vertical bar > right-side of bar: "Do you see a small white square icon of an open-end wrench head"? |
The little wrench went unnoticed for so long - its in a few places - like on " my skins list"
Reply #28 Tuesday, June 13, 2006 1:15 PM
| [Night Train] The best thing to happen to the community in quite sometime were the mini skinning competitons that were starting up on a regular basis. Things like that unite most of the community. I don't think the prizes really matter in these contests as they have not been very big, yet the contests have been succesful. |
I agree ...the prizes weren't really important but it was fun, i miss the contests .
Reply #29 Tuesday, June 13, 2006 9:09 PM
Reply #30 Wednesday, June 14, 2006 7:13 AM
Reply #31 Wednesday, June 14, 2006 10:04 AM
Reply #32 Thursday, June 15, 2006 2:23 AM
Reply #33 Thursday, June 15, 2006 3:05 PM
| it is very annoying to go through pages of icons from the same author when they should be submitted as one upload... |
I agree with you guys 100% as well on this one. In addition, it was always my opinion that single icons/pngs should have always been uploaded to the "Misc Icons" or "IconPackager" libraries if there was more than one icon/png. As it is now they are strewn between 3 different libraries, so they are submitted 3 times. Not only does this take up space, but when someone opens a library and sees the same thing right off the bat they would tend to not bother looking any further in that particular library, thinking its just more of the same thing. This in turn would prevent someones elses upload from being seen if they had only uploaded it one time to one library.
Reply #34 Friday, June 16, 2006 8:34 AM
I know in the short time that I've been back, the couple of walls that I've made so far--I've done two renders... for here, and then a widescreen for me.
Reply #35 Wednesday, June 28, 2006 7:17 PM
Reply #37 Thursday, June 29, 2006 12:45 PM
Reply #38 Thursday, June 29, 2006 6:36 PM
Tell me what do I do just install that and go from there downloading icons?
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Reply #21 Tuesday, June 13, 2006 7:47 AM
Fairyy~ ....don't forget...I'm the Number One Fan of Litestep here...yet agree it should probably not be frontpage....so it's not like I'm inconsistent.
Both have their place...but neither is as significant as [the current appeal for] Windowblinds, or...who knows what will be new and exciting with the advent of Vista, etc....