/me to joe

one problem with wallpaper previews, I often use the previews as my wallpaper instead of taking the time to download the zip file. Most people put what is in the zip file into the preview anyway at full size and resolution.

joetheblow:


Also I think the "freloader" are people who would sign in anyway and suck the life out of the site AND still go to deviant art and deskmod.


wtf are you talking about? I am beginning to see the problem with a lot of the adamant opinions here. WC is a nice place, I like it. In the last few days I have also commented on about 50 peices at devart, and posted a couple of dozen times on their message board. I have commented on stuff at Art Uproar. I visit the other sites more than daily.

That is part of being in a community. It offends me to the core that taking part in other sites is considered to be a betrayal in some way. It is utterly silly that people are acting like there would be no place to get wallpapers or Winamp skins if WC didn't host them.

Get out a little more. There are hundreds of skinnable apps, and there are only a few here. If you "rather like the 'one stop shopping' aspect of WC" then you have a limited shopping list. There are a lot more products out there.

Frogboy: Sounds like a plan to me. Whatever works for WC works for me.

bakerstreet:
I know there are allot of places to go but I like to roost here.


And I do feel that the people who are downloading the most are the ones who make 3 or 4 accounts just to get as many as they want. Other wise why would this bandwidth thing still be a problem? There are already caps for downloads, why isn't it working?


And I didn't mean to portray my words as "this is the only site in the world" I felt that if people came here and they get a cap tell them about the subscription or tell them about the community and how to help and tell them about other sites like Deviant art to get wallpapers.

When they get the message saying that they reached their limit for the day, tell them and show them that there are other wonderful sites to go to. You can come back tomorrow for more if you want.

Something like that.

Jobeleca:
yeah I noticed the preview sometimes is the wallpaper. Suppossedly the artist should have made a smaller jpg file for the preview instead of the large screensize file.

At any rate, I hope it can be worked out so that people can browse freely while the ones who just want to download bandwidth hoggin stuff all day long without contibuting something to the site can be weeded out.

baker...there IS the thought that WC is the largest 'skinning' site in terms of hits, so perhaps a lot of the visitors don't actually make it to the other sites.
We do, because we are 'within' the community.

It'd be interesting to know how many visitors are 'unique' to Wincustomize alone...

Jafo:

You know, the other day when Peff and D_S and the rest were nagging me about how I was acting all 'artisty' when I hadn't done anything I thought it was really strange. I have stuff all over the place... I keep finding my old work all over the internet, as a matter of fact, places I never put it ... I'm only starting to put stuff here.

I guess you're right. Shame they don't see what a huge community this is.

One of the things I'd always be doing when I got some 'know it all' comment on an artwork at Devart was to tootle over and check the bonafides of the commenter...and they'd have a 'finger painting in drool' as their 'piece de resistance' and I'd make some comment like I could do that, too, before his parents were born...

When people only see 'baker, the bloke with 'tude', and don't have a 'history'/portfolio to see to show competence/authority/experience, then you'll get feisty retorts...

I have been reading through this thread and I felt that I wanted to contribute. I am an avid wincustomize user and willing to go to the expense of subscribing simply for one reason: QUALITY! I am a no-good at producing your artwork, yet I have to recognize that skins make PC work more exciting and pleasurable: "giving credit where credit is due." This is the attitude that all users have to adopt. Many artists have given up a lot of their time and work to make some great skins. In a way, evryone has to realize that if the skinning community is to develop and grow, everyone has to contribute. Perhaps I am an optimist, but wincustomize should enhance and offer features that no other sites have even thought of. The question to put into peoples mind is: What am I missing? Perhaps I'm talking a lot of garble, but I want only the best for this site.

Bakerstreet, I understand what you say I was merely talking from WC point of view, that is, try not to have the server busy thing and as a result being confronted with those yelling threads on the message board. This is a thread I have enjoyed giving my 2 cents and what Frogboy came up with sounds good.

Bedtime for me...

Mommmmmmmm! Bakerstreet started it! *kidding*

Honestly, I try not to upload too much work and I try to just keep it at the average res size (1024 x 768) and a jpeg only as to not hog up too many resources (which I wouldn't mind having an "upload" cap for wallpaper submissions).

Ho hum...

Bakerstreet, I'm not the greatest digital artist and it would take years for me to master it with my humble lil' mouse. I still am a much better sculptor with real live clay than I am a painter in real live paint etc. but again... ho hum.

So, I'm just going to smile and say, "I never did mind about the little things."

Dang, I missed the heat of the drama!

TTFN

Drama.....

(Firstly, I would like to say that I have only read a quarter of the way down the page, so someone might've already suggested these)

That said, here are my suggestions of what to do

1. Call MS and tell them to make windows use jpg files as backgrounds without turning active desktop on (who seriously thinks they can't do that?). Or maybe they have in XP, I don't know.

2. Do a survey on the site, asking what resolution we use and make people include wallpapers for the 1 or 2 most popular.

I had some more ideas, but I forgot them

Ryan, if you don´t want ActiveDesktop but JPEG wallpapers try one of the wallpaper changing programs.

am excellent freeware is this one: http://www.wallpaperchanger.de/
it supports BMP, JPEG, GIF and PNG, is skinnable and also can make your desktop icon caption background transparent

Jobeleca to feline

Jobeleca - With regards to the argument you mentioned... The solution is for WinCustomize admins to post monthly how much money was taken in via sales and how much was spent on bandwidth, servers, basically on the cost of running the site. As long as the site doesn't show a profit that would kill that argument.

reasonable idea, if the site admins want to publish the money numbers.

the only potential problem with is getting people to read the relevant page

Wallpapers aren't the issue. There's no magic bullet really. We'll just have to put some cap on how much non-contributors can download per day.

out of curiosity, does wincusto have numbers to compare with other sites, past/present?

like, when skinz was big, what code were they running, and what quantities of bandwidth was consumed, etc.?

are we comparable?

Skinz.org topped out at around 5 megabits at its peak.

WinCustomize uses over 20.

Damn!!!

Thats allot of megabits....

Nothin small about that, I'd say.

A resonable cap on downloads per day seems to be the solution

It's interesting to note that at one time, Skinz.org was the only skinning site [still] open on the net, when Deskmod and Customize both went down, and before Devart and the others started...

well poop.

(be proud, Jafo, I dug the dictionary out to get that technical term! )

Kinrik....you know what they say...'if you don't eat, you can't poop, and if you don't poop, you die'...

BEFORE the limit is turned on, can you provide us with a link to a FAQ page explaining what the limit's are, who they effect, and WHY?

i suspect we are going to get a LOT of complaints and questions about this from people who havent read this (and other related) threads over the last few years.

it would be nice to just copy/paste the link to the FAQ, and say "here are all the answers".

if you put some graphics using the letters "win xp" on it, people will probably even read it, and use it as their wall paper

I don't think we need another FAQ, all we need to do is update the about section. Add the different levels and put in the level restrictions. Then all you have to do is refer them to the about section.

so long as it is written down somewhere we can point people at, i am happy

"if you put some graphics using the letters "win xp" on it, people will probably even read it, and use it as their wall paper"