It does to me, §tatic

Hopefully, some others will respond.

Adni, I'm not going to start to list them because I don't want to give anybody any idea, but there are indeed many ways to cheat the system to increase the download count if you're not logged in.

pict: the problem is that if we do that downloads will cut by dramatically. Most people would never bother signing up an account and would just go somewhere else.  You're probably looking at getting around 25% of the downloads, at the most optimistic estimate.

I have to say that someone must be brave to post in the Message Board, he or she, is in great danger to be accused, if you know what I mean.

adni,

That is a trend I've noticed but I think its because there has been an unnatural number of posts recently that are accusatory in nature and directed at the admins or at least directed at some of the things they are trying to do. In many cases I think its a natural defensive response.

Everyone's nerves are becoming a little raw and I think it would do everyone good to step back and just let the admins do their job. If then there is evidence of abuse, hank-panky or whatever that is the time to make the case. It is unfair to suggest abuse or unfairness before the system is given a chance.

I think that if you log-on a cookie is placed. I never logoff...So when I go to the site I am automatically logged on....

But it is easy to log off, delete the cookie, and return unnoticed. I never log off either, but I have some idea how the mechanism works, I've had enough HD crashes to know.

paxx,
Good point. I think you're right in that some people (maybe even the majority) who don't login would not register in order to be able to download. But if the logged in only downloads are the only one's that matter as far as top counts go, they shouldn't decrease. It's likely they would increase slightly as some folks would register in order to be able to download the great skins, etc.
I'm just thinking it would even the counts. In other words, there wouldn't be a raw and WC count, they would all be WC counts and people could stop the speculation and arguing and so forth and get back to skinning and all the other good things this community provides.

#55 by pictoratus,
"In other words, there wouldn't be a raw and WC count, they would all be WC counts and people could stop the speculation and arguing and so forth and get back to skinning and all the other good things this community provides."


I think this is a great idea, simple and clear!

I gotta agree with Pictoratus. Everyone can view this website, since its public, but if management was to force people to login in order to download, I think it will eliminate all this confusing ways of couting downloads and there wont be any need to keep a hidden list of WC downloads. In return, this will also eliminate all this speculations and arguments. I think this will be great for the site aswell as for the authors and members.
After all, visitors can only download 5mb (wich is about 2 wallpapers and a skin) before they are force to create an account, So I really dont see any harm in making the downloads only for login members, as a matter of fact, i think it will encourage more people to log on and create accounts.

[Message Edited]

Personally we do not want to require people to create accounts in order to download skins.  Only after bandwidth and costs became an issue did we start requiring accounts after x number of bytes downloaded.    We really did not want to do that but it became a necessity.

In has been our position that we want new comers to the site to be able to freely navigate  and try out skins without having to jump through the necessary hoops of creating accounts. 

Can you imagine how many accounts we would have now.  Instead of 600,000 plus it would probably be more like 20,000,000 accounts.  We would be storing information for people who will most likely never come back. Then that opens up another can of worms.

The suggestion is appreciated but is not practical and goes against some of the ideals that we are trying to put forth.

T-man
Thanks for responding to this. This, in my opinion, is the way it should work. Regular people have ideas, make suggestions, etc. and the admins respond in a logical coherent way.
Hopefully, we can see more of this kind of discourse on this board.


Maybe there is some debate about how many people would sign up (I tend to agree with paxx) but at least we're talking about it in a civized manner.

I have to agree with #58 by Janitor T-Man , it is another point of view and very reasonable.

pictoratus;

Amen

"T-Man and the Admins".....

What's the bet I'd end up as the roadie?....

Yes, as T-Man said.

But pictoratus, don't forget that the WC downloads are only used for the top 10 lists. The regular overall downloads are still counted when you look at the downloads your skins got.  Don't forget that the top 10 list only features 10 authors. The other thousands of authors I'm sure appreciate to know how many downloads they got overall. It's quite more encouraging to see you got 5,000 downloads than 500 (the difference is about 10 to 1).

You're right about that paxx
I'll take 5000 anyday over 500

I really appreciate you guys taking the time to explain it so well and the reasoning behind it. I do believe the goal is a 'fair' system. Maybe everyone can just show a little tolerance as the bugs are worked out along the way.

/me reads this entire thread...

/me smacks head on desk repeatedly

Cruel and unusual punishment.....for the desk....

I will never understand this obsession with the Top whogivesa Lists........................ Just skin something damnit, and pour me another mug of coffee! 

The current system is much more fair than the previous one and is similar to what is used by IMDB (The Internet Movie Database).

Check out http://www.imdb.com. It's even more popular than WinCustomize.

Any person can vote on a movie that is in their database. However, only a subset of those votes (registered users) are used to calculate the all time best/worst/etc. movies.

Similarly here, we track the downloads of all skins because 99.9% of skin authors will never be in the top 10 lists on the site. But they are certainly interested in seeing how many people downloaded their skins. And we track the top 20 or so skins/authors on their own seperate page.

But for what is displayed here, we use registered users. This helps avoid intentional/unintentional manipulation of the list. In addition, statistically, the rankings should not fundamentally change.

But as the IMDB example shows, WinCustomize is not the only one who uses a subset of its user base to determine top 10 rankings and they do it for the same reasons we do.

 

Sugar & milk?

How about we just don't let anyone download ever? that way no one will need to worry about this.