Frogboy

Frogboy

Joined Last seen Member # 1
1,345 Posts 4,662 Replies 103,892 Reputation
Reply to Registered your software? in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

I know everyone hates when I get statistical... But statistics are the only real way to make these kinds of decisions. We can't live on anedotal view points. WinCustomize already does nearly twice the bandwidth per month that skinz.org did at its height. I've talked to Mian about this very issue on many occasions over the years. And that's the issue. When we set up this site, we assumed it would never do as much traffic as Skinz.org did. Skinz.org was the ideal site.

157 Replies 45,872 Views
Reply to Admins, when are we gonna see a Hoverdesk section?? in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

This is a surreal moment where I have to say "Listen to Paxx". BTW, WinCustomize isn't a neutral site. Where was it claimed it was otherwise? Stardock pays for this site to exist and as has been pointed out countless time, the bill is considerable. I'm not sure under why people would think that Stardock should pay to host competing company's software. Does Hoverdesk's site host DesktopX themes? Does it link to DesktopX's home page? Of course not. Are any other developers host

41 Replies 17,560 Views
Reply to Admins, when are we gonna see a Hoverdesk section?? in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Briefly, our analsys indicates that having a Hoverdesk section would have a negative impact on the Stardock apps (namely DesktopX and ObjectBar). This is because few people know about Hoverdesk outside the skin community, thus far more people would be introduced to Hoverdesk through this site versus Hoverdesk users being first exposed to other apps. NeXTStart and Litestep have sections because they've already "made it" (they have a significant community of their own). They bring new use

41 Replies 17,560 Views
Reply to Registered your software? in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Yep. Today, 18,000 DesktopX themes/objects will be downloaded. Put in perspective, around 24,000 WindowBlinds skins will be downloaded. So DesktopX is definitely very popular. So the first thing we would do is simply see what % of that bandwidth is used by unregistered users. If it's only like 15% then it's not worth pursuing. But if it's 50% for instance, heck yea. Half of 40% of our bandwidth use (20% for those of you in Palm Beach) is a good chunk of bandwidth. And that's not

157 Replies 45,872 Views
Reply to Registered your software? in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Interesting statistic we found today: Currently, the DesktopX section alone is using over 40% of the download bandwidth. 40% for just that section. Such a system of limiting downloads on those who haven't registered could be done just on DesktopX, leaving all the other sections unaffected. It would make a good pilot program. (as a point of reference, WindowBlinds only uses 15%).

157 Replies 45,872 Views
Reply to What is your score? in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Hey now, you can have sex appeal and get a high score. I'm married, have kids, and had girlfriends throughout highschool and college. What killed me was the Star Trek stuff, the magazines, and globes (Yes, I have a globe, it lights up, it has the mountains, etc.). And of course my main job is writing computer games which I do inbetween getting into flame wars on Usenet. And I realized this

131 Replies 39,042 Views
Reply to Registered your software? in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

No one is suggesting people pay $50 per year. Right now, let's just think about the folks who: Have NEVER purchased anything. YET still download 50+ MEGABYTES of skins and such. Do you know how many skins someone has to download to get that high? And there are a LOT of people fit that description. Thousands (literally). Bandwidth intensive sites that don't have banner ads have a vested interest in actually lowering bandwidth consumption. If "nagging" people who pira

157 Replies 45,872 Views
Registered your software? in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

Just curious how many people downloading skins and such here have registered the program they're downloading skins for. One of the things we've thought about to keep bandwidth use under control would be to look at someone who's downloading many megs of WindowBlinds skins and see if they've registered WindowBlinds or purchased Object Desktop and bring up a dialog nagging them or something. Some people using the shareware version are of course just trying out skins but if they've

157 Replies 45,872 Views
Reply to Yay, i was promoted :) in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

If you get to Journeyman, that's pretty far up there as there's only a few Journeyman out of the 30,000+ accounts on the site. The next step is "master" and that's someone who has been around for quite awhile. I think there's only like 3 or 4 masters on the site (Dangeruss being the perfect example). Then Wizops who can approve or reject submissions and news items.

34 Replies 14,452 Views
Reply to Yay, i was promoted :) in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

No, caste systems are not based on merit, they are based on the concept of "birthrights". There is no upward mobility in caste systems. You are born a certain caste, you die a certain caste. In fact, WinCustomize is one of the few sites that isn't a caste system. On other sites, you start a powerless end user, and you stay that way. Here you have upward mobility based largely on merit.

34 Replies 14,452 Views
SkinStudio 1.1 released! in WinCustomize News JoeUser Forums

Stardock has released SkinStudio 1.1. SkinStudio is a program that lets you design your own custom interface to replace the drab UI of Windows 98/ME/2000/XP. The skins it produces can be used by WindowBlinds and ObjectBar to transform the Windows GUI. It's a free download, check it out.

5 Replies 7,668 Views
Reply to So how fast can you go? in WinCustomize Talk WinCustomize Forums

This is good feedback. When you're on a direct connection, it's hard to gauge any difference. I was at my mom's neighbor's house the other day and he's on a 28.8k modem and WinCusto was unbearably slow. Loading those thumbnails took forever. So I right clicked on them and just gasped, each thumbnail was nearly 30K. Display 10 of them and the thumbnails are 300K by themselves. Add another 80K in HTML and you're at nearly half a megabyte just for browsing a page. We h

47 Replies 16,941 Views