DeviantArt

Congratulation to <b>all </b> of you, for keeping this very interesting and hot thread in a high quality level!!! <br /> <br />Merry Christmas! :)

I would like to VIEW my eleven messages, MY FRIENDS, But I no longer have ENOUGH cash to keep up my subscription.. SO WHAT? Ya just FLUSH THE JOHN ??

umm..... huh?!

I think it&acute;s a waste of money to buy a subscription at DeviantArt. That&acute;s my opinion. :D

Chickie.. ❤️ .. I disagee there... they have been good to a lot of us.. :o IF THEY F**ed up their money ? Wll that isnt my end of the biz.. CALL ME .. Unknowing, I appologize................. :)

I wouldn&acute;t buy a subscription for myself. It&acute;s ok for others. <br /> <br />Sed, I had problems with DA in the past. It still burns me. Now, I&acute;m in & can download beautiful art & skins. I dunno why in hell DA showed our IP address thingy. I got banned for no apparent reason. Someone STOLE it on me. It pisses me how people lie, cheat & steal to get what they want or have nothing to do with their own lives. Sadly to say, but it&acute;s true. :-( <br /> <br />I do have friends at DA. :) ❤️ Especially, here.

hmm... makes you wonder if skinbase will have such problems in the future... <br /> <br />my two cents here: <br /> take wallpapers off of skinbase, make that basehead&acute;s sole purpose. <br /> therefore, skinbase won&acute;t have as many leechers who are here just for the wallz...

I quite agree with you Nicki! <br />I wouldnt mind if the walls were &quot;transferred&quot; to basehead.org entirely

Well the thought is nice but isn&acute;t basehead.org run by gRAVE too??? I hardly see where he would benefit by that kind of change. Looks to me the cost is the same... Although I see the advantage to Skinbase if it did not have the walls... A true skinners site... Hmmm... interesting... :)

Well, will wonders never cease. <br />&quot;Posted by: nikuki skinbase won´t have as many leechers who are here just for the wallz... &quot; <br />What the hell does this mean? Leechers? Are you out of your mind? Who are you? <br />Some of you people would not be happy unless everyone that didnt think like you where taken to another planet. <br />You all sound like a Bill Gates clone. Towing the MS corporate line. Due unto others and then screw em. <br /> <br />

Orion: What is ment by leechers are those 127 of the current 129 people on Skinbase downloading stuff, <br /><b><font size=&quot;5&quot;>THAT ARE NOT LOGGED IN AND DO NOT HAVE AN ACCOUNT</font></b> <br /> <br />Who the fuck do <b>you</b> think <b>you</b> are?!?!?! <br /> <br />The least thing <b>anyone</b> can do if they want to mass-download from <b>any</b> site, is to create an account and log in when visiting! <br /> <br />And if you think we&acute;re all doing this <b>just</b> for the sake of money (Hence you reference to MS), why dont you just fuck off back to your own sites?! <br /> <br />Sheesh, c&acute;mon dude..... lighten up puuurleese, that last post of yours was way out of hand! <br /> <br />

Out of hand?? You shouldn&acute;t let your emotions fly... A better choice of words would bring across your point. :( <br /> <br />Orion, I&acute;m confused with your last post... Just what point are you trying to make in regard to the subject?? :|

Snowman, i know who the fuck I am. Im just someone trying to get along in a world of shit. From every damn direction there is. <br />Thats my point Hob, the skinning community is more cutthroat then the porn industry. I have tried to make a point here with this topic, that a little respect goes a very long way. thats all. Its my opinion that Devart does not do that. Yesterday I tried asking a serious question about posting rules at another site and some moron tells me to &quot;shut the fuck up&quot;. Or a post of mine is not accepted with no reason given, leaving me with no idea what was wrong. <br /> <br />Unfortunately, thats not a rare accourance. I come back to this thread and i see that people are talking about killing off wallpapers. More crap I have to deal with. Im an administrator at a site where the only respect that is consistent is from myself. I said it before and ill say it again, this site rocks, and for the most part, so do the people. The emoticons leave something to be desired but i can live with that. <br />But were we all not &quot;leechers&quot; at some point? <br />Anyway, Ive been around this stuf for over 2 yrs and the abuse and reckless disregard of other people is amazing. <br />This site is no exception I see.

Believe me Orion I know exactly where you are coming from... When it comes to respect, I have found that &quot;respect&quot; is something that is held from forums.. For some reason it is held back in the community, not by choice of the site owners but the people posting... What I&acute;m trying to say is simple.. You are judged by your last upload... Because of the vast number of &quot;new users&quot;... They go from site to site looking for anything that fits their fancy.. Some get to the chat boxes and some even make to the message boards... Not many but a few.. They voice THEIR opinions of the works uploaded and are quick to say &quot;it&acute;s garbage&quot; only because it&acute;s not what they are looking for... <br /> <br />A lot of people will say, What the hell does he know... He&acute;s not a skinner and doesn&acute;t even make walls... but his nose in these threads as if he knows what its like... Well I DO know FIRST HAND... I see the frustration that the skinners have to go through... I see the hours spent trying out new programs to get &quot;just the right effect&quot; for a new skin or wallpaper... I have spent a LOT of money on hardware, programs, AND SUBSCRIPTIONS to various applications to change the looks of Windows... What I have found out is just this... It takes a certain type of person to cope with the various types of problems that have to be dealt with on a daily basis... The pain staking time to deal with the minute detail for perfection... and after each of these items are addressed and perfected... That piece of work still has to pass its final critic... the skinner&acute;s scrutiny...a skin to change windows will usually take 3 to 4 weeks to complete, a wall 1 or 2 weeks... Only after spending this time and drawing on personal talent... does the skinner reap his/her rewards... SATISFACTION... <br /> <br />So, Orion... When it comes to &quot;respect&quot; you won&acute;t always get it when conversing with other people on the messenger boards, chat boxes, e-mails, or in any other form of communication. However, you will find that respect with people that have the same interests as you. But keep in mind, &quot;respect&quot; is, and,always will be secondary to &quot;satisfaction&quot;.. <br /> <br />Oh, btw Nikuki is an admin here at Skinbase... :)

<b> No skin site could exist without a wallpapers section </b> - <b> all good skinners have started skinning by doing a wallpaper </b> , (we all know that there is no rule without exceptions). <br /> <br />Love and understanding is what we all really need, the rest are secondary. <br /> <br />Let us try to have a better New Year!

<i>I come back to this thread and i see that people are talking about killing off wallpapers</i> <br /> <br />No one is talking about killing off walls, only moving them to Basehead.org, which <b>was</b> gRAVEs initial thought (amongst others) about that site. Dunno if it will ever be though.... <br /> <br /> <br /><i>But were we all not &quot;leechers&quot; at some point?</i> <br /> <br />Umm... not I. If I wanna download some skins/themes/pics/whatever from any site I create an account and log in before downloading anything. As said before, that is the least you can do if you wanna be a part of any site! <br /> <br />There are alot of people that never take the time to do just that. That is in my opinion wrong! <br /> <br />----- <br /> <br />Well since the talk has taken the wallpaper-direction, lemme give ya my point of view on walls: <br />Apart from <b>many</b> others I generally dont give a shit about walls. Sure there are made alot of fine and well made pieces but I wouldnt be the first to cry if there were to appear a site purely for skins/themes and without any kind of wallpapers/general art/photos/etc etc - I hardly pay any attention to those anyways. <br />Heck I cant even recall the last time I actually downloaded a wallpaper..... but I do remember which one it was: http://www.deviantart.com/view/22382/ <br /> <br />I dont say this as an <b>admin</b> but as an <b>artist</b>!

Actually, snow started out as a ripper: http://www.teknidermy.com/issue6/artsknvntry.html Which just shows that you can&acute;t judge a book by its cover.

And a little bit more on topic: the only way to prevent people from not signing up (that&acute;s one complex inverted sentence) and &acute;leeching&acute; is by denying access to the site unless you have an account, sort of like how Art&acute;n&acute;Skins does it. <br /> <br />As for walls, solid black for the last few years.

hehe ;) Dont hold actions from the past against people. <br />That was a loooong time ago and I needed the money!

that was not what I ment.....

ahhh <br />thanx for the replies everyone including Hob. <br />I never heard of basehead.org. This IS a very frustrating community in general. Hob, you make an excellent point(s). <br />The amount of money and time in applications and such makes comments like the one i got the other day (shut the fuck up) from someone whos only posts were desktop pics, even more frustrating. <br />heh heh I wanted to slowly kill that guy! I guess the only real way to deal with this IS to limit the sites to registered users only. <br />Actually I have no problem with that at all. And maybe even limit them to users who contribute SOMETHING other then crazy-ass rude remarks. <br />btw, if I were a mod at that infamous site, id ban that jerk. <br />ahhh............live and let die

Well, FYI <br />I cant get into my own site cause there are too many UNREGISTERED users. I lost the info to to where I can shut it down. <br />Cosimic justice strikes again.

adni--not true, i dont&acute; make wallpapers ever. only one i did was from a photo i took... <br /> <br />snow--thanks for backing me up <br /> <br />orion--i didn&acute;t mean it to be negative toward non-skinners, only that the bandwidth used for wallpapers could be directed to basehead.org and perhaps the wallpaper section here could just simply link directly there... then there is still sort of a wallpaper prescence onthis website <br /> <br />also as a point, i two, like snow was never a leech. i always sign up for an account before downloading and always try to comment on work i do download! <br /> <br />perhaps download quotas could be put in place for non-members.... like only 30 a month or something... which would encourage registration which would encourage participation in the community and perhaps go so far as to encourage new skinners.... <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />just a few thoughts

personally, i&acute;d really love to see a skin-only site (with no wallpapers that is) so that it wouldn&acute;t have wallpapers just to draw in the everyday people who might not necessarily be interested in skinning at all and only want to browse the wallz. a site just for the community itself, perhaps (not that ppl who only make wallz are not included in the community). by nature it would probably be smaller and not have as much traffic as ones that include wallz... <br /> <br />it just seems a little unfair that the wallpaper sections always are so huge in number of additions compared to the skin sections... i want the emphasis to be placed on hard-core skinning for once. <br /> <br />just my opinion...

i would absolutely love to have my own skin site... but i don&acute;t exactly have the budget to afford that. <br /> <br />this site is the closest thing to perfection i have seen in a skin site--it has everything i was looking for after the fall of skinz.org <br /> <br />perhaps i can get a bigger voice in this site and add my creative ideas and problem-solving skills to the mix. <br /> <br />i wish grave were around more... he seems to just quietly work in the background these days...

You didn&acute;t read my post carefully <b> nikuki </b> , I said: <br /> <br />No skin site could exist without a wallpapers section - all good skinners have started skinning by doing a wallpaper , ( <b> we all know that there is no rule without exceptions </b> ). ;) <br />

adni, that&acute;s not necessarily true, i am very sure that a skin site could survive on skins alone... it may not get the huge number of hits that sites the include wallz would, but it wouldn&acute;t die or dry up... <br /> <br />i know you know that not everyone makes wallz to start out, i was just pointing out exemptions to your hasty generalization. <br /> <br />have a little faith in skinning as an art, it could very well stand on its own!

adni, i did read your post carefully, i was just offended by your generalization... please don&acute;t accuse me of not being able to read or not being thourough enough to understand what is being said, i am also offended by the comments that i did not read your post carefully!

Nikuki you have a very valid point... A true skinning site probably would not get the hits at first... But after it becomes known... It may become home to skinners of ALL apps.. :)

What constitutes a &acute;skin&acute;?

I am sorry nikuki if you have been offended, it wasn&acute;t my intention, I only wanted to support the wallpaper authors and their hard work, someone has to do that for those authors who are really supporting Skinbase.

i understand adni, it&acute;s ok. no hard feelings. <br /> <br />i just think for once it would be nice not to include wallz. yes, in a sense they are skins, but it just seems to be the general consensus that a skin site needs wallz in order to build a large user base. <br /> <br />in my opinion wallz are part of &acute;skinning&acute; but aren&acute;t necessarily &acute;skins&acute;. this is a very grey area and there truly is no right or wrong. to me a &acute;skin&acute; is made for a specific program which supports it by nature. everything else is just gui tweaking. <br /> <br />i also want to make clear that i am not demeaning wallz or those who work very hard to create them in any way.

just thought of another point. <br /> <br />those who make wallpapers have tons of places to upload and share their work because every skin site has a wallz section... <br /> <br />those who skin some rare apps or just a few don&acute;t have quite as much choice as to where to show their work and hence don&acute;t have as much exposure to downloaders. even if you only skin one rare app, chances are a lot of places are not going to host skins for it... that&acute;s one of the reasons i love skinbase becaseu it was the first site where i could truly show off all of my skins at the same place!

Gosh, Crae....I&acute;d forgotten about Snow and his ripping way back then.....[the swine]...;) <br /> <br />Ah....a blast from the past....takes yer back, it does.....;)

I think a site could survive quite well without a wall section.....think of all those bruised egos you wouldn&acute;t have to contend with...;) <br /> <br />As for time taken to do a skin vs time taken to do a wall.....some of the &acute;moderated&acute; ones at Wincustomize are proud that the &acute;done it in 5 minutes cos they were bored shitless&acute; [walls].....whereas one of my LiteSTEP &acute;themes&acute; took years and was never released as it weighed in at over 250 meg....;p <br /> <br />That&acute;s obviously an extreme variation......as is a Buzz Hog render of 3 days processor time versus some dorky 5 minute bootskin image [I know...I&acute;ve taken just 5 minutes to make one]...;)

I think a site could survive quite well without a wall section.....think of all those bruised egos you wouldn´t have to contend with
Are you being sarcastic? If you are I think it is funny.
I had no idea Snowman used to rip people!! Whats up with that?

A Theme that took years?? Thats a bit extreme on the other end!! I make no excuses for most of the work being submitted. Sometimes I find an idea comes together very fast and sometimes I find it needs to sit for quite a while before I can get it to work for me. As of now, I have like 5 pieces that are not done and wont be done for a while yet while I explore different options.
Speed may or may not play a part. Hard for me to judge the entire community as far as that goes. I have no idea how YOU can.
As I said, if you were making a joke earlier it worked, if not, then I would say you are way out of touch with the ego thing.
Not that your wrong, but it goes a bit deeper then that.
BTW
what constitutes a skin?

Orion: It all started just after I &quot;opend up&quot; my (now rather big) collection of skins, to the world. <br />Dunno wtf I was thinking about but I actually redistributed other peoples work without permission aka ripping..... <br /> <br />It ended rather quickly too, after I got a few..... not actually nasty mails, but definately not nice mails from some of the higher ranking members of the legendary Skinz.org, such as Bakerstreet, Hippy and a few more. <br /> <br />But that didnt bring me down! After nearly 5 years, I am still collecting skins from near and far for my collection which at present holds 37,808 skins and themes (<b>not a single wallpaper</b>) <br />Approx 340/350 of those skins/themes are done by myself :) <br />http://skinventory.onlyhere.net - if you wanna have a lill look <br />Its not even close to being uptodate - I have spent the last year or so reconstructing the site.

talk about a true lover of skins! hehe <br />snowyyyy! =) <br />/me goes peek at your site (been ages)

you lil pack rat you! hehe <br />looks really good snowy =) <br />(surprised to see ppc skins even)

I don&acute;t know exactly the definition of the skin <b> ORION </b> , but a wallpaper it is not a skin. <br />A wallpaper may be a part of a skin some times. <br /> <br />A skin change the look of an application or the windows, buttons, menus etc of an OS. <br />It needs graphics and a script. <br />Icons are included also in the skins category. <br /> <br />I hope my poor English has answered your question. <br /> <br />

A skin is a set of files that can be loaded into an appat runtime in order to provide a customised interface. Wallpapers do not provide interfaces, ergo wallpapers are not skins.

Adni and Crae are quite correct.....Wallpapers are not skins. They are a single image without scripting or ini files etc....whereas a skin will generally comprise more than one image file...often quite a lot of them and with one or mor config files of one form or another. <br />Generally &acute;skinning&acute; requires more diversity of expertise than what many wall images take. <br />Put plainly.... <br />A wall is a single image <br />An Icon is a single image <br />A Winamp skin is a dozen or so images of different forms and functions combined with 3 or 4 ini text files....sized and named and coded to be &acute;read&acute; by the proggy it &acute;skins&acute;. <br /> <br />Simple, really...;)

As for &acute;bruised egos&acute;....dead serious. The amount of vitriolic abuse admins receive for having the gall to determine what they might or might not allow on their privately owned site is quite sad. The vast majority is from some two-bit pretender that just stole Photoshop and discovered the groovy lens flare filter and ups his 5 minute dribble and demands the world pay homage to his doggy-do. Then, when it hits the floor he accuses all and sundry of personal vendetta and tries to verbally burn the admins some new arseholes. <br />As I said....by and large the skinners, icon artists, etc seem to not attract quite the same percentage of bottom feeders and we get far less grief from them, no matter how controversial an incident/decision might be...;) <br /> <br />With wall artists I look to the quiet achievers....the ones who simply create good stuff...and don&acute;t spam for comment/ego-fondling...and there&acute;s plenty of them.....most are never heard from or even comment on the boards....take a quiet wander through any site&acute;s galleries. The real gems are just there quietly appreciated...;)

Snowman>LOL <br />I will check out your site asap. <br />Jafo, I agree as far as deciding what should and should not be posted. That is totally up to admins, period. <br />And I agree with the cut and paste/lens flare comment. ( cant get enough of Britany)ugh. <br /> <br />Um question, where did you all get the definition of a skin? j/c <br /> <br />I wonder Jafo if you are referring to myself as the ones who &quot;simply create good stuff&quot;. Um not sure what you mean by &quot;ego-fondling&quot; but I assure you I fondle only myself.

Snowman <br />I have bookmarked the site and will take time to browse. <br />looks interesting

Thank you very much Orion :) <br />(dont mind any errors you might get, I <b>am</b> rebuilding the site, you know) ;) <br /> <br /><i>Um not sure what you mean by &quot;ego-fondling&quot; but I assure you I fondle only myself.</i> <br /> <br />HAHAHHAHAHAAAAA LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL good one!!

I&acute;d just like to applaud in my corner.

Sorry if you thought I was talking in “Greek” .... No offense <br />intended to my friends here at Skinbase... <br /> <br />Let me clarify my position... I thought I made it clear on my first <br />post... The way you boasted as you came into this thread, was to let <br />all of us “uninformed” users of certain programs that “we have to be <br />enlightened to” the consequences... should the “parent” of “certain” <br />programs suddenly disappear from the scene... <br /> <br />Well... I for one, will tell you that it makes no difference to me if <br />WC “disappears” and all of the programs that “Its” parent company <br />creates!!!! Stardock, and the way you seem to “represent” that <br />company and its affiliated programs and public web sites, will, <br />sooner or later, find that there are MANY other programs that are <br />skinnable... and many of the artiest here in the “community” prefer <br />to skin the majority of those applications and NOT necessarily those <br />programs that you seem to represent.... I have also noted that WC <br />has boasted about the number of members and guests on line at a <br />given time... but is the ONLY site that does not give that information <br />to the current viewer by “online” status.. I can only wonder... <br />WHY.... <br /> <br />If I were the proprietor of a “small site” and should the “bigger sites” <br />fold up... How much time do think it will take me to REMOVE <br />those categories from my list??? 2 minutes??? because I’m a slow <br />typeset... maybe... Now as an owner.... How much do you think I <br />should CHARGE for those categories to be re-instated??? <br />HMMMMMM......

care to elaborate on that genius opinion of yours, sed?

GIBBERISH!