when you buy a subscription to this site or a stardock product you are given acess to this site .. with certain stipulations .. those stipulations are set by the sites administrators and are not negotiable..

you bought a subscription to this site .you did not buy the site. they dont owe any body free space or storage.

a subscription also dosent give you automatic admins approval on your works..if it sux they will deny it.. if is to common place they will deny it .. if it violates any copywrite's .. they will deny it ..

these guys and gals keep the level of artistry here at a high standard ....you want your art hanging with the best of the best ?????? post it at WC.. if not post it sumwhere else ... nuf said .....





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great site

Skinner ChasUGC if there is no money to be made off the hard work, what is the point.

1) Not everything in this world that I enjoy doing is about making money.
In fact, most of the time it's the opposite. For example, I enjoy being with women, but most of the time that involves spending money.

2) I believe that a true artist doesn't create with the intention of making money. He/she creates from their heart, mind and inspiration, and hopes that others will appreciate it, and enjoy it.

3) I believe that money is the root of all the evil in this world. So, I could never skin to make money. I skin because I enjoy it.

This is just my opinion.

For example, I enjoy being with women, but most of the time that involves spending money.

lol Chas... u2?

#103 by Skinner ChasUGC - 7/28/2004 2:27:45 AM 3) I believe that money is the root of all the evil in this world. So, I could never skin to make money. I skin because I enjoy it.

Hehe, I say let the sin begin!
But seriously, doing it for the cash is actually a lot more fun I find. The end result is woth it if you're doing a client piece. You get some cash for something you would probably have uploaded for free if you'd made it for yourself, you get a good piece for your portfolio, and the groupies are fantastic.

If this site were to close, there's a 90+% chance that the wife and I would not find another site as the ones we have visited we don't like.

WC in my mind is the premier skinning site. It draws the top skinners and also draws the people who are looking for skinners. The wife has turned down work and passed it along to other skinners and has made enough money from the jobs that she has done to have paid for everything we have bought from Stardock and then some. So even though most skinners can't make money on their skins here at WC there are other pay off's and the time is comming that skinners will beable to make money here at WC. Don't expect to get rich.

Like I've said many times before, if you don't like the site, go somewhere else. Why stay some place you don't like. If your WALLS keep getting rejected, upload them somewhere else. Why bitch about it or send nasty emails. It won't change anything, your WALLS still won't pass.So quit crying, all that does is give you high blood pressure.

Brad..here's some good advice! Don't sweat the small stuff & be kind to dumb animals!

Yep, youve got alot of supporters, they were more nicer ppl on here when I first joined. Now its a up and down ride.
In one day ive seen my ratings drop they are still ppl giving good skins low ratings and bad skins high ratings etc. Maybee we should make a must have uploaded 1 skin in 1 month or theyr membership will get removed or something.
Ah those were the days

PixelCargo , think about what you just said. Over 1,000,000 members and less than 1% of those are skinners. Removing those that don't upload 1 skin a month + those that don't skin would leave WC with about 200-300 members. That wouldn't work.

Ive also said it was a friendlies place a couple years ago, but Jafo pointed out thatit was the same, just less people so less idiots.So they were not noticed as much.As the site grows, so does the distractors, but so do the good people. Its just the way things are. It all starts in how people were raised.

Maybee we should make a must have uploaded 1 skin in 1 month or theyr membership will get removed or something.

If they're all of the standard of David Knott's SETI then yup. Otherwise a million Luna variations zooming Fuzzy's way is gonna be a sight to see


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only 1% !? wow gene have to rethink that one.

Brad,

I appreciate your hard work and I agree with Ross (way back on page 1) that the providing of a central location for skinning "artists" to post their work should more than make up for any perceived injustice re: royalties.

"Illegitimi non carborundum". For every one bit of hate mail, there's at least 10 of the rest of us that think you're doing a great job, blogs included.

Cheers,

Jeff

I need to make an apology to any and all at Stardock. Even though I [don't remember] ever whining, bitching or otherwise complaining about anything concerning Stardock, I am truely sorry if I have.

I have complained to myself about the cost of the Object Desktop every year but I never thought, maybe I'd never noticed, that the site was included in that cost. (I still think it's too much but that's only because I really just 'cause I can't afford it. But... I make sacrifices )

That's all...

Just a quick note regarding the comment about skinners who want to make money via selling skins(from this site or otherwise).

An artist who makes high quality skins is highly respected and his/her work is used often and shown to others outside the skinning community even more often.
by showing off this work, and telling those who appreciate that work who the artist is and where they might find that artist brings business to that artist from the outside.(and inadvertently brings more customers to stardock and wc)
How many skinners out there have recieved offers for paying jobs creating graphic content for various companies, who's employees have viewed the artists work second hand on someone's desktop or even right here on WC?
the best form of attracting customers to one's work is to advertise.
each skin an artist makes is a personal advertisement for that artist's work. It travels around the world for all to see and all it costs is some time and effort (ok so add a wc sub and or a OD sub.,.. still peanuts for all that free advertisement.)
sooo, why demand funds from wc? or it's customers?
might as well ask an advertising company to pay you for watching their commercials.you'll look just as ridiculous there as here where you're asking for revenue to compensate free advertisement.

addendum...

premium skins available on this site are a great example of what I was just talking about. The artists who created those premium skins were approached because of their skill and talent to create a product for this community. their "free" advertisement in the form of skins created for the libraries directly resulted in their being paid for new contracted work.

wulfn1 - you're sort of making it sound like it's an either/or situation. I seriously doubt that being given the opportunity to upload premium skins for sale will stop any skinners from releasing free skins as well. On purely practical grounds the artist would need to offer up free skins to maintain their connection to the community, attract new customers to their premium skins, generate goodwill etc. If you're speaking of advertising then the best way to advertise is to offer up free skins for anybody to download and use, benefitting the artist and the downloader alike.

just a thought

Some free skins are better then the ones you have to pay for anyway. I get bored of the skins I use per week so it would be very useless to buy a suite.
In my case that is.

actually I wasn't even remotely suggesting it's an "either or" situation.
Was merely pointing out there is a benefit to posting skins to this website that you weren't paid for in any way.

also note, I wasn't suggesting people should purchase only premium suites. I was trying to get across that the artists who created the premium skins created NON premium skins first.
it turned out to be to their advantage to create skins for the wc libraries.

amazing how some can read things into words that are plainly typed.

Was merely pointing out there is a benefit to posting skins to this website that you weren't paid for in any way.

so, we were kind of saying the same thing...sorry I misunderstood your meaning

lol
exactly
I thought maybe you hadn't read the original post and only read the addendum,... which out of context makes less sense.

But seriously, doing it for the cash is actually a lot more fun I find. The end result is woth it if you're doing a client piece.

Nah, the fun part is getting it done and releasing it. It's like letting your child go into the world for review. I feel like god when I make a skin. I creating something unique, gave birth to it, and set it free for the critics to love or tear apart. I don't want the critics to tear my children apart. This is my motivation. To protect my children so that they get love. (Chas psycho-babble)

and the groupies are fantastic

There are groupies in skinning? Hmm. fantastic? Hmm, hmm.

don't jump the gun and put your wallet away yet

hehe

Hi guys,

Wow. Thanks for the support. I really do appreciate it.  I'd like to respond to some points and kind of illuminate some issues that are only partially touched on:

1) WinCustomize finances.  WinCustomize loses money. A staggering amount of money.  Some say Stardock needs WinCustomize.  That's really not true. deviantART or some other site would definitely be up to the challenge of being the "official" site for Stardock's skins and themes.  Microsoft, for instance, doesn't even have a skin library for Windows Media Player.

So why do we have a skin site? Because we love skinning and customization.  You always have to wonder what someone is possibly thinking when they start talking about "greed".  Do they really think there is "big bucks" to be made changing the bitmaps of your title bars and Start bar?  We're proud to say that we can make a living on it.  But no one is going to be buying a private plane any time soon! . 

We love being able to do neat things to our comptuers. It's as simple as that. And like many of you, we like to share what we do with others. We all do that in different ways. Hence, WinCustomize exists.  Hopefully, down the line, we can get the site to being self-sustaining.  It inches closer to being self-sustaining each year. And hopefully WinCustomize 4 will be even better at that.

2) People, myself included, have scaling problems. It's hard to envision the impact of having nearly 3 million different people visit your site each month.  There are about 1.4 million registered accounts here. 

The problem with hate mail (90% of the nasty stuff I see is sent to me via email or forwarded to me one way or the other) is that it doesn't take very much to have quite an impact.  I personally get around 900 to 1200 email each day.  3/4ths of which is spam. But that still leaves 200 to 300 email each day I have to go through.  Out of those 200 to 300 email probably about 5 are from unhappy people.  Out of the 30 to 40 unhappy users emailing me each week, probably only 5 or 6 are really really nasty. 

It's just a matter of build up though.  How many emails or posts or whatevers over an extended period of time does it take before something isn't as fun as it used to be?

Many of you are skinners.  Imagine if you're a good skinner and you've spent 5 years giving away great skins for free. But you also have a couple of premium skins out there that you charge a nominal fee for.  Intellectually, you know that you have lots of people who do appreciate your work.  But how would you feel if you got a dozen or so hate mail each week telling you how greedy you are? Or how your skins suck? Or how they're going to report you to some agency because of some error on their part?

Heck, I've had people tell me they hope I get cancer and die. Seriously.

That is the sort of thing that makes it tough.  I think the tipping point was over the weekend I got slightly more hate mail than normal. And then I come on and read a bunch of bitching about the fact that I wrote (gasp) a third article talking about the Dashboard and Konfabulator thing.  3 articles.  I mean sheesh, newspapers cover the same topics over and over again and here I was writing something that I (and other developers) found interesting and I still had people yelling that I would dare write about something *I* was interested in.

I hate that sort of thing.  If I had been in that person's shoes, I would have gone onto JoeUser.com, opened up a blog and started blogging about customization related stuff I was intereted in and then emailing to see if WinCustomize would link to that blog.  We get a pitifully low number of news submissions each week and so I decided to do the blogging thing because I wanted there to be somethign unique and interesting on WinCustomize.  I'd rather someone else create blogs (on JoeUser) that I coudl link to or quote but that's not the case so I do it myself. 

And I enjoy writing.  But sheesh, it's tough when you get an email telling you how much the game you wrote sucks, how much my opinion on software piracy is "moronic", how WindowBlinds "made them have reformat and that we better compensate him for his time or we'd get sued", and then to see someone bitch because I want to talk about what Apple is doing.

But that's the breaks when you're doing something that's seen by millions of people. And I can grasp that.  I could probably grasp that better if the pay was better. Which is the other issue, nearly everyone who sends nasty email isn't some customer (the customer complaints are the minority). It's usually someone complaining that we're charging for something or about the shareware version or about their account or their skin or their wallpaper or whatever.

I think on WC2K5 we'll definitely have to do mroe for people who are subscribers. Some cool little button along with extra features.  That's the really galling part This site gets nearly 3 MILLION uniques each month and about 200 people subscribe each month.  If 1% of people who visited subscribed, that would be 30,000.  If 0.1% people who visited subscribed that would be 3,000.  So if you're a WC subscriber, you're one of the elite elite elite elite users  (0.01%).  Just like if you're an apprentice or higher.

If we had even 0.1% of people subscribing, then WC would be easily paying for itself and I could hire someone to answer the hate mail!