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

Every once in awhile I get someone who is shocked to learn that I don't act "professional".

My handle is "Frogboy" for crying out loud. If I had to act professional all the time I'd become some Fortune 100 developer or something and make the big bucks. Being able to run around as "Frogboy" and debate this kind of stuff is one of the handful of perks of being at a small company that makes desktop perosnalization software.

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

Bleh, I still think these are kids who are still growning up, trying to adopt a "noble cause" to build something solid and serious at the same time. Thus they provide the news, cause they have to since it concerns part of the community, then they criticize it. Or bash on it. Or whatever. Teens are mixed up, but of course, don't go telling them that. *grin* They are quite happy being Don Quichote, although every adult think he was a psycho.

Brad, the best you can do is delete the site from your bookmarks and never go back. I never ever go there anymore. I don't even consider it as part the the community for real.
If an 8 year old started his own kiddie skins web site, it may be a lpace that would interest other kids his age, but it wouldn't be one of my favorite for sure. A teen skins site is hardly better AFAIC.

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.

*notes that WinCustomize is effectively Brad's bookmark page*

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.

The fact is whether they are 10 years old or 40 it doesn't excuse a skinning site admin attacking skinnning software on any skinning site. Their actions are flat out inexcusable and wrong. It appears they love the controversy, the arguments and name calling. They must think it makes them cool somehow, probably in some whiteboy hip/rap I'm so bad sort of way. hehe what a couple of losers... they want you to use stylesxp which isn't skinning software, doesn't do anything, limits you to using MS's evil XP, adds nothing to windows and forces you to have a Luna looking system. Give me a break... that's why everyone thinks they're teenagers.

Ignore them and ignore their site. The more controversy that they generate (which is why they went off their own site to get attention) the more traffic they get. It's pathetic that when they notice their own site is being ignored they go to deskmod to start a fight hoping it will bring users to their own site. I say ban 'em as the trolls they are.

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".

Customize.org was the first customization site I went to (before skinz.org even). So I have a soft spot for the site itself.

So it's hard seeing it being ruined as it has.

For me, the issue isn't whether they like WindowBlinds or not. Lots of people even more ignorant than them flame it all the time for all sorts of reasons both legitimate and silly. The issue is administrators of a skin site that have a WindowBlinds section actively going around trashing it.

They are lucky I"m not "professional" or we'd never had Customize.org in the GUI Olympics. It doesn't statistically qualify as a major skin site anymore (VelocityART gets more new skin submissions than Custo) but just like skinz.org, there's that nostalgia value. They could turn it all around if they'd just get admins that treated people decently.

Whoever owns the site doesn't have to bring in these guys to be admins.

Len Lampert is listed as the only contact under whois.

With all the jerks that populate skin sites (and you all know the type I'm talking about), Customize is the only one I have found that actually hires them as admins. I'd call their behavior childish, but that would be an insult to children everywhere. I would delete my stuff, but the "manage uploads" link doesn't work, or maybe it does

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

I wasn't at skinz.org long enough to get a feel for the place, but when it went down and ls.net started having its difficulties I ran here. Regarding the maturity angle, you and I alone bring the average age here way up

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.

wow! Sorry I didn't mean to stir the pot by starting this whole thing. I don't have a account there thank god. My dad whose a pretty good biz guy has a saying "Failures are the ones who try to redefine success." Non-failures know success when they see it. There is no such thing as relativistic success.

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?

Reading through that morass of hatred, envy, and deliquency was like watching a car wreck. It's wrong to gawk but it's hard to look away.

Maybe it is due to my gender but I must pose this question; why are you even dignifying them with a response?

Perhaps it would be instructive to pose it a different way. If you were all together in ''real life'' would you waste your effort trying to discuss something with some teenaged geek? You're dealing with anti social geeks over there. You can't reason with them. They don't know better. Teenagers know everything, remember?

Is the attention you are giving that ''slum'', an apt description, due to trying to convince them or trying to save the site from itself? It doesn't take a statistician to recognize a hopeless cause. Even the most casual of users can gauge the lack of meaningful activity on that website.

And the battle lines are drawn so clearly. Logic and reason is lost on testosterone addled teens. Nobody would waste their time on these pissants in real life, why give them the time of day?

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.

jcg: "its the ignore-them-and-they'll-go-away attitude that has caused them to become what they are."

Exactly, they what they have become is almost disapear into oblivion. The site is ignored by just about everybody, and it's been getting worse for a while. Yes, eventually, they will just close the site.

/me 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.

It's not so much a generation gap crae, but rather a whole different way of thinking and of social interaction.

For the most part, the people who come to WC regularly seem to be pretty level-headed sensible people with a realistic perception of right and wrong, and what is appropriate for those in a position of power to be seen doing on their site.

On the other hand a large majority of the people who frequent Custo, and consider it to be a well-run site and a worthwhile thing to contribute to, seem to be of the 'they can't see us, so we can say whatever we want' mentality. During my years on the net, I've seen many a site go under once the majority of the users are of that mentality, and it only hurts a site to have admins who actively encourage such unreasonable behaviour.

I'm not saying everyone who considers themselves a part of Custo has a bad attitude, I'm just saying that if the admins set such a bad example, it's not surprising when the site begins to attract that element and repel those people who actually make a worthwhile contribution.

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.

Good analogy.

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'....