With regards to my recent rant about hatemail getting me down...

All I can say is: Wow. Thanks for the support. I really do appreciate it. 

I'd like to respond to some points and kind of illuminate some issues that are only partially touched on:

1) WinCustomize finances.  WinCustomize loses money. A staggering amount of money.  Some say Stardock needs WinCustomize.  That's really not true. deviantART or some other site would definitely be up to the challenge of being the "official" site for Stardock's skins and themes.  Microsoft, for instance, doesn't even have a skin library for Windows Media Player.

So why do we have a skin site? Because we love skinning and customization.  You always have to wonder what someone is possibly thinking when they start talking about "greed".  Do they really think there is "big bucks" to be made changing the bitmaps of your title bars and Start bar?  We're proud to say that we can make a living on it.  But no one is going to be buying a private plane any time soon! . 

We love being able to do neat things to our comptuers. It's as simple as that. And like many of you, we like to share what we do with others. We all do that in different ways. Hence, WinCustomize exists.  Hopefully, down the line, we can get the site to being self-sustaining.  It inches closer to being self-sustaining each year. And hopefully WinCustomize 4 will be even better at that.

2) People, myself included, have scaling problems. It's hard to envision the impact of having nearly 3 million different people visit your site each month.  There are about 1.4 million registered accounts here. 

The problem with hate mail (90% of the nasty stuff I see is sent to me via email or forwarded to me one way or the other) is that it doesn't take very much to have quite an impact.  I personally get around 900 to 1200 email each day.  3/4ths of which is spam. But that still leaves 200 to 300 email each day I have to go through.  Out of those 200 to 300 email probably about 5 are from unhappy people.  Out of the 30 to 40 unhappy users emailing me each week, probably only 5 or 6 are really really nasty. 

It's just a matter of build up though.  How many emails or posts or whatevers over an extended period of time does it take before something isn't as fun as it used to be?

Many of you are skinners.  Imagine if you're a good skinner and you've spent 5 years giving away great skins for free. But you also have a couple of premium skins out there that you charge a nominal fee for.  Intellectually, you know that you have lots of people who do appreciate your work.  But how would you feel if you got a dozen or so hate mail each week telling you how greedy you are? Or how your skins suck? Or how they're going to report you to some agency because of some error on their part?

Heck, I've had people tell me they hope I get cancer and die. Seriously.

That is the sort of thing that makes it tough.  I think the tipping point was over the weekend I got slightly more hate mail than normal. And then I come on and read a bunch of bitching about the fact that I wrote (gasp) a third article talking about the Dashboard and Konfabulator thing.  3 articles.  I mean sheesh, newspapers cover the same topics over and over again and here I was writing something that I (and other developers) found interesting and I still had people yelling that I would dare write about something *I* was interested in.

I hate that sort of thing.  If I had been in that person's shoes, I would have gone onto JoeUser.com, opened up a blog and started blogging about customization related stuff I was intereted in and then emailing to see if WinCustomize would link to that blog.  We get a pitifully low number of news submissions each week and so I decided to do the blogging thing because I wanted there to be somethign unique and interesting on WinCustomize.  I'd rather someone else create blogs (on JoeUser) that I coudl link to or quote but that's not the case so I do it myself. 

And I enjoy writing.  But sheesh, it's tough when you get an email telling you how much the game you wrote sucks, how much my opinion on software piracy is "moronic", how WindowBlinds "made them have reformat and that we better compensate him for his time or we'd get sued", and then to see someone bitch because I want to talk about what Apple is doing.

But that's the breaks when you're doing something that's seen by millions of people. And I can grasp that.  I could probably grasp that better if the pay was better. Which is the other issue, nearly everyone who sends nasty email isn't some customer (the customer complaints are the minority). It's usually someone complaining that we're charging for something or about the shareware version or about their account or their skin or their wallpaper or whatever.

I think on WC2K5 we'll definitely have to do mroe for people who are subscribers. Some cool little button along with extra features.  That's the really galling part This site gets nearly 3 MILLION uniques each month and about 200 people subscribe each month.  If 1% of people who visited subscribed, that would be 30,000.  If 0.1% people who visited subscribed that would be 3,000.  So if you're a WC subscriber, you're one of the elite elite elite elite users  (0.01%).  Just like if you're an apprentice or higher.

If we had even 0.1% of people subscribing, then WC would be easily paying for itself and I could hire someone to answer the hate mail!