Giving something to the "Community"? or Self Promotion?

from WinCustomize Forums
I probably shouldn't even go here, but this "just trying to give something to the community" thing sounds very hollow and a means to self-promotion and high downloads with not much regard for true quality or talent, and to what end? Just wondering if I'm seeing thing all wrong..
8,661 views 17 replies
Reply #1 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Boss019 Well first of all like I always say, I believe that everybody has the rights to an opinion...if you agree or dont agree with them..and for this thread..i know you are talking about me, cuz you left basically the same comment in one of my skins, so let me clarify this...what do i have to gain? I am not getting paid..whats downloads gonna give me? Got enough money...is Hollywood gonna sign me up,i dont think so.I simply do this for the follwoing reasons...I am retired, which gives me a lot of free time on my hands..as an older man who worked all his life to raise a family..I am used to being a giver,and I never believed in taking without giving. And I try to apply this aspect in all parts of my life. I believe that if you want to be involved in something that you should try to do your best to do what you can. if it goes from writing a small little message to being the vice-president. So if you find fault with that, there is nothing I can do. But as I have already stated a lot of times there is nothing to gain, just self gratification and having some people maybe like what you tried to do.
Reply #2 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Butch, Im not out for a personal attack. It's just that until you hear the painful truth you won't change your ways. People dont want half assed ports. They want care and attention put towards your submissions. NOT QUANTITY. Your download counts should tell you that. Again, shout back if you feel necessary but you should be thanking me for being honest.


By leaving a useless comments on every skin you hope to achieve #1 in skin comments. By doing this you have undermined the meaning behind yourt comments and every comment you have made to date is an insult to the Author. The words just take up space.

By dashing through the libraries, rating everything you see without testing it you hope to achieve #1 in ratings given. There is no other explanation for this.

By uploading incomplete port after incomplete port you are trying to achive better rankings in downloads. Lots of people have tried to tell you and you keep ignoring them. You continue to upload port after port . They are haphazardly slapped toegther for uploading. I downloaded one the other day just to see what the big huff was about (Red X). The skin was in need of many graphical repairs and all I could think was, DID HE TEST THIS? You cut the logoff dialouge background from the start panel image and had the glossy shine all wrong. You didnt care though, you had more ports to work on and this one had to get out the door.
The Political Machine 2024
Reply #3 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Also to Butch: I'll wait for the day when those pointless two word comments actually mean something (gasp! maybe he'll use more than 3 words for now on because he's finally number one!). Also, I hope that the ratings given are actually based on opinions of using the skins and you're not just clicking the rating already given. Sigh.

Again another addition...I have nothing against what you're doing for WC, and obviously the new artists like your comments and it motivates them to do more. However to some of the veterans it seems like an never ending struggle for attention. What can you do about it? All I can think of is to try to put more effort into your work. After nearly 30 WBs ported, I think I would know how to actually please the general populace by putting all the bells and whistles into skins after that kind of experience. However, it's hard to see improvement. Maybe if you put that little ounce of effort into your skins and you don't concern yourself with getting a port out every other day, then your real reputation in the community (or at least my view of it) will also improve. I hope that helps.
Reply #4 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Night Train As I have stated before comments whether negative or positive are appreciated. And I do appreciate your feedback. First of all, I do leave messages to people, but its because I like what they do and I also like to encourage people. I dont see anything wrong with that...10 words or two as long as you give your opinon, it doesnt matter. you say I rate without testing...how do conclude this? And I realize that I do not have the experience you do, as you have many years behind you, however wouldnt it be of more beneficial to everybody if you were to offer your knowledge instead of trying to belittle me? Because thats exactly what it is...I am double your age and I can read between the lines. This is supposed to be a community and you are the more experienced ones and as such shouldnt you be one of the people to try to help the new people out..so that our quality improves? Because if its not just about ratings then you wouldnt care who gets the more downloads. Oh by the way, as a fellow cat lover..I know you gotta be a nice guy ! Just maybe a bit young.
Reply #5 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Developer DoctorNick: I do appreciate your feedback and if you read the comments i wrote to Night Train just above you will get an understanding of my feedback. I would always welcome any and all input to help acheive the goal of the community...and I thank you for yours.
Reply #6 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Hey, one of my Screenshots has 9 comments and it shows 0, Administration, please correct this or my day will be ruined
Reply #7 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I am double your age and I can read between the lines
Well that makes you 80 years old then. That explains your stubborness to listen.

however wouldnt it be of more beneficial to everybody if you were to offer your knowledge instead of trying to belittle me?


That is what I do. I have helped alot of people with windowblinds. I even teach a class. Maybe you should check that class out. I have a workshop set up for people just like you that need assistance in making windowblinds. The posts have been all over the messageboards, have you missed them? Doubt it. You want someone to personally tutor you through making a wb. Well that takes hours and hours of time and is only available to people that show they have the attention and care required to make something spectacular.

Rating without testing......don't deny it. You do it, and denying it only undermines your arguments.

I AM TRYING TO HELP YOU BY TELLING THE TRUTH. I can't say that I didn't foresee my comments getting trashed by people but what I said needed to be said.


You think your comments help but they don't. They have become meaningless and a joke to the community. I find it hard to believe you haven't gotten the hint by now.

Like I said, I was just trying to tell you how it is. I am not belittleing you at all. I see you saw my advice about the shutdown flags on your ports. It helped didn't it? So before you go calling me immature and not willing to help newbies, you really should wake up. The world is not sugar coated and neither is the truth.
Reply #8 from WinCustomize Forums Top
butch, I've been here a # of years and haven't rated/commented on as many things as you have. I don't even have all the different programs (NextStart,LiteStep & many others). So I don't comment or rate them because I can't apply them to see if they are good. There's no way you can convince people you have all the programs or the knowledge to use them. So why comment or rate them! Doesn't make sense. And believe me, the authors (most of them) take your comments as a joke and you, because they know you haven't used the skin. You may go ahead and continue doing what your doing and believing you are right and everyone else is wrong, thats your choice.

Oh, and I'am retired also.
Reply #9 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Butch, if I commented "verry nice" or "super" or whatever it is on EVERY skin you upload, don't you think by the end of it...it would lose it's meaning and I'm just commenting for comments-sake. People do think your comments are a bit of a joke, and I promise you it's very noticable to anyone who spends a bit of time on this site. EVERY SINGLE skin you comment on butch, I even see 3-year old LITESTEP skins with comments. Do you use Litestep? Well, if you don't...why did you comment? Do you see anyone else doing what you're doing? Perhaps it's not the normal thing to do then.

The same applies to your ports, I've seen the comments about your skins being unfinished, as I've left a few of them myself, but you simply ignore them and upload another unfinished skin right after. The facts are this, I can take any of your ports...and show them to anyone who is experienced in Windowblinds, and I guarantee you all of them will say the same thing. "It's just another button-click job with SkinStudio." Now from your point of view, you see this as providing us skins which we would otherwise never have. Which IS a good thing, but not when the quality of each port is so low. If you REALLY want to do this community a service, then you will LEARN how to use SkinStudio properly. It took me a long time to learn SkinStudio myself, and I still don't know it 100%, as anyone on Stardock's IRC channel can tell you. But I'm trying to better myself, I'm studying other peoples skins, and learning how they did it, experiment and see what this does, what that does. I am now in the process of making my first skin, and I say it will take me about a month for it to be finished 100%. Why so long? Because I expect the quality of my skin to be very high, and won't settle for anything less. If you applied the same thinking to your ports AND comments, perhaps you will be much more respected in this community than you are now.

Butch, please don't take my comments (or anyone else's for that matter) the wrong way. We are not trying to belittle you or make you look foolish. We are trying to show you why the things you do are getting on a lot of peoples nerves. I have been wanting to say this for a long time, but I've just been too polite to confront you about it. I hope you see this as just trying to help, not hurt. Thanks.

---

Ok, I'll leave it.
Reply #10 from WinCustomize Forums Top
if you were to offer your knowledge instead of trying to belittle me?


Butch, I'm only going to quote what I've said, but many, many folks and admins here have tried to get through to you. This first comment is from one of the first ports you did....

Comment# 4 By Scribe Essencay - 1/14/2005 1:44:32 PM
While SkinStudio can do a fairly good job at porting msstyles to the wba format, the created skin still needs to be tweaked and missing elements, elements that most WindowBlinds users expect, need to be added to the skin. In the case of this skin, as with every straight msstyle port, the logoff/shutdown dialogs are not skinned. Another area that SKS has a problem with is the trackbar buttons as you can see when you open this up in SKS the Horizontal Trackbar image port was messed up by SKS and needs to be manually fixed. Also all the files for shellstyles seem to be missing here. Not all the classic colors are set either, so that someone using this skin will find some strange colors in places based on the previous skin they had loaded.You may also want to try importing the msstyles as an UIS2 rahter than UIS+1. UIS+1 is a faster skin, which back in the day of Win98 and slower processors was a bonus, but UIS2 offers much more flexibility and adds bonus features that aren't available with UIS+1 such a roll-up, which a lot of WB users can't live without and can be added to any skin without the need of any additional graphics



And this is a direct offer of assistance in Jafo's Any Port in A Storm thread....

#32 by Scribe Essencay - Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Okay I was going to go into this whole dialog about how what SKS does is import, not port and continue to split hairs about porting to try to differentiate the manual porting done in other apps from SKS's import feature. I've decided against that. Desktop customization, no matter the path taken to get there, is why we are here.

Instead I'm offering assistance, at least with WB skins. Anyone young or old, fresh or aromatic, porting a MSStyle or creating a WB skin from scratch, can and will get help if they visit The Workshop at Skinartistry, whether they need a SKS class, step-by-step help or just a bug check. Or you can contact one of the Admins there directly if you want to be more discreet about the help you seek.


Night Train runs the workshop....and he wouldn't be commenting the way he is, if you had at least taken up my offer to assist and help. Basically I don't think you give a damn what kind of crap you upload as long as it gets you downloads. You are not giving anything to the community.....you ports are a disservice to the the quality work of the original authors, to porters like Snidely Whiplash and Snowman and others who understand how to produce a quality port.
Reply #11 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Forgot to mention....note that my comments are almost a month old now....
Reply #12 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Excellent comment Hus, what I wanted to say somehow but you said it perfect..there is no animosity, just a feeling that some time and effort should be put into the ports to feel proud that you uploaded a good quality skin and didn't just "point and click". I ported a total of 1 VS because I figured out how to do it with SKS and I liked the skin. You and a few others told me how unfinished it was, I had no idea what I was doing, but when I was told, I fixed it a bit as best as I could and won't ever do it again until I know what I'm doing and can put a quality skin, port or my own, out there. It's just a matter of personal pride to me
Reply #14 from WinCustomize Forums Top
First of all, I do leave messages to people, but its because I like what they do and I also like to encourage people. I dont see anything wrong with that...10 words or two as long as you give your opinon, it doesnt matter.


I think it matters, what content the comment has and how many you leave. I think the endless comments of "verry nice" are useless and unconstructive, it's a repetition that's become a joke. Neither will it encourage me or motivate me. You even dig up old submissions and comment on them? For what reason?

Based on the comments on your submissions and what's been said here, I suggest you take those classes NT holds or take the advice I know some people have been giving you, get the technical aspect right and invest more time in your porting. Making sure vital parts actually are skinned and the skin is functioning instead of releasing it to just port another. Obviously you have an interest in it, otherwise you wouldn't be porting. I've only downloaded 1 of your submissions to see it in SkinStudio, and frankly it needed tons of work.

You've released more WBs than I will make in the next 10 years! I wouldn't mind if you put more effort into it, spending more time to add those extra features that WB has that msstyles hasn't. Please listen to the people here. They mean good
Reply #17 from WinCustomize Forums Top

butch123 .... I think it would be wise to listen to your skinning 'elders', irrespective of their physical years.

In a comparative sense you would be classified as 'rug rat' where most who have commented are heading towards middle age.

But that's not what it's about.  It's about a little more observation...of how others interact and contribute to the site... how they show reasoned comment after actually testing the skin/whatever.

Sure, you can comment on other areas of skinning that you have no actual experience with....eg Litestep and Nextstart, but do not presume to be competent/qualified to post a rating after blankly viewing the jpeg image of it.

This goes equally for everyone....it's called drive-by rating...and is guaranteed to raise the ire of those who are aware of it.

A randomly inserted comment may make someone look stupid or just a spammer....and can be ignored for its folly.... but to simply throw any old rating at as many works as can be done at 2 second intervals is 2 things....

1.  It is insulting to the author of the work.  Think back to when you were at school...and a teacher plucked your test results out of thin air on a whim.... consigning your career to the gutter.

and

2.  It WILL stop, or it will BE stopped.