Ap67, I'm sure you'll be happy on dA. Some of your wallpapers are nearing he 100 download mark I saw.
But seriously, you can't have it both ways. You can make whatever claim you want for yoru contributions. You removed the evidence of that contribution, not us.
Look, Ap, we've been around for a long time. Before WC many of us were around years before then. People like you and Lady A and such have come and gone the whole time. It's an established pattern.
Do you wonder why so many long timers here dont' take it very seriously? Because it's the same post, different person, different website. These same posts have shown up on Skinz.org, WinCustomize, deviantART, Deskmod, etc.
And they always end up going the same route. But let me save you some time.
For the next few weeks you'll submit everything you possibly can do site X (where X could be deviantART, Deskmod, or whatever sit eyou choose). YOu'll do your best to promote it. You'll then discover that things aren't quite as happy as you had thought. Downloads aren't nearly as high as you would like. Few comments. A loss of recognition.
At some point, you might complain on a message board about this. At that point, you'll discover that site X's denziens are not any more tolerant of complaints as this site or any other site.
You'll discover that the grass is not so green on the other side of the fence. But at the same time, you'll be too proud to admit you made a mistake and in fact deny such a thing if asked when the time comes.
We've seen this a lot for many years on many sites. It always goes roughly the same way.
I can name two dozen high profile authors who, over the years, have gotten mad at WinCustomize for some reason (subscirptions, commercial software, ratings, flame in comments, lack of promotion, etc.). They proudly announce they're going somewhere else. But discover that they don't get nearly the recognition they thought they'd get. And they fade away.
I'll use one example of this - Carlitus. I use him because he was one author whose contributions were truly significant. I'm not talking a bunch of standard glassy swirl wallpaper stuff (no offense). But icons, themes, and other significant artwork that was used by hundreds of thousands of real people.
An artist who really made a big difference. He left because he disagrees with the site having a download limit for non-subscribers. I don't think he recognizes the costs in running a site of this magnitude but it was his right. And with him went literally thousands of icons and themes and objects. Irreplaceable stuff. And there was nothing we could do to placate him.
And so throughout the winter he submitted work to dA. But submitting work is tedious. Especially most of it gets relatively few downloads. He had individual things here that over a 100,000 downloads. It's hard to go from that to a fraction of that.
And so one of the most active contributors of 2002 has not submitted anything to a major skin site since last Winter (that I can find anyway and I do look).
And so I ask you, in the end, who suffers? WinCustomize? Sure, to some extent but it doesn't affect traffic because people don't know what they're missing. Once a website reaches critical mass, individual content doesn't have that kind of effect.
The ones who suffer are the community.
And so the same pattern plays out year after year. Your post could have appeared on dA's message boards. There have been plenty of them over the years just like yours saying that they're going to go to WinCustomize or Skinbase or Deskmod. Same reasons.
But at the end of the day, you have to decide why you even make this stuff.
I'm not afraid to say that I like to share my stuff but I even more like to see lots of people using it. Lots of people commenting on it. And that's what WinCustomize has going for it. That's because WC treats artists extremely well. It may not be some imagined ideal, but in the real world of intellectual property handling and distribution, WC is pretty good at it. And that's why it's the #1 skinning site by a mile.
And believe me, WC did everything it coudl to try not to be #1. It limited the # of sections to being a select few. It moderates wallpapers. It has actively promoted other websites. When I was on TechTV, it wasn't WinCustomize I mentioend first as a place to go, it was dA and Deskmod.
To make a long story short, you may find that the grass isn't as green on the other side as you thought.
