Logons and Bootskins

The Yule is nigh, as is people's propensity to find any AND ALL vaguely Xmas-related images from heaven knows where, call them 'bitmap_100.bmp' and shower the Moderation queue with as many as can be had at 19 to the dozen.

It's far too easy to take any old wall image and insert it as a logon....particularly when no effort is made to skin the user-logon panel and/or buttons, or actually provide any relevance to a system-logon at all...so we are inundated with a flood of similar-themed logons which are both incomplete and have not had sufficient 'skinner' input to be seen as fair-use rather than just as plagiarised wall images belonging to a third party.

A Logon is a 'skin', not a single image.  It would be far better to provide one or two well-made and complete Logons than a sea of below average ones.

Much the same applies to bootskins....

Get an image...be sure it has an elk pretending to be a reindeer....shrink/enlarge/distort to 640x480...dither to within an inch of its life so colour number count approximates 16, or 2 more than counting your fingers....[don't worry too much if it has no progress bar - can add that next Xmas]...and the hardest thing you have to do is remember to rename 'zip' to 'bootskin'.....[oh, yes....that's right...we forgot, didn't we?]...;)

It's all very noble to want to give humanity enough X-mas boots to shod all the bare-footed in the world...but perhaps a page out of R.M.Williams [famous boot/clothing manufacturer in Australia - Oilskins, etc] philosophy on boot-making is salient.....I remember him in interview saying...if they are well made they'll last...and then he showed how supple his first boot was [it could be twisted like a corkscrew, yet was 50 years old].

Some of these Xmas 'offerings' are more like a surfer's 'thongs' or 'flip-flops'  [you may have to look it up]...;)

Anyway,....a wee bit less of the quantity, and a wee bit MORE of the quality would see the Moderators' lives more enjoyable [and a lot more of the submissions accepted]....;)