How to win friends and influence people...
 

Now then folks, here's a thing, we all hated the "mad dog" saga, the serial review bombers, the zero star givers, and yet while browsing around the skins database, I find this comment posted goodness knows how many times........

Hmmmmm, here's the thing .... this whole "it's a skinner.exe skin and has no right to be on winamp.com" is.....CRAP, that is such an elitest attitude to take, "I say it's bad, so it must be" and it stinks to high heaven, geeeze what a way to inspire people to carry on working, point out how to make there skins better, then send them plummeting to the bottom of the pile, talk about knocking the box out from under them.

Has it never occured to any of you in here, that the guy who makes his skinner.exe skin of his cat or girlfriend, is doing it because...

A) Winamp is a bit of fun, and so are skins.
B) He can place it on a web site that has 17 million hits a week, and tell his friends about it?

Winamp = FUN

By all means offer the benefit of your wisdom to these people if you must, but try and do it in a positive way , or your gonna scare people off, "huh I'm not going to post there no more, all I get is people picking on me", way to go to inspire the newbies out there.

If you wanna offer sage advice, use the mail button and talk to the author personaly, don't leave some cut/paste comment, that's not only rude, it's also a complete waste of space, this is one step up from the mad dog saga, if only for the fact that more words are used.

I'm bucking hard to get this kind of "zero zero" shit removed from the database, and passing the time by cut pasting another few dozen reviews around is just adding to the already creaking database and making the reviewers jobs that much harder.

Just because someone dosn't have photoshop, or isn't a digital artist extraordinaire, dosn't make them any less of a person, and certainly dosn't give them any less right to post stuff on winamp.com, this is a site for everybody remember, that's why it's so damd popular, if you want elite content, then I suggest you take your skins over to somewhere like Deviant.

The author of that comment knows who they are, give me one good reason why I shouldn't have all your reviews removed?

Ok, end on a smile, always helps :)

[edit] Oh and read this is you wish to see me rant further about this subject.... The right tool for the right job [/edit]

Nice point
 

There have been many times where I review a skin and I have to dig pretty deep to keep the comments constructive. Hell, I'm still crawling here too. The one good thing about skinners is it starts to open up the idea of actually completely customizing a skin. I'm a perfect example. I learned from the skinner and a couple of weeks surfing and reading posts to find the right tools, the right template, the right tutorials, and the correct dimensions for all the windows. I like to think that if you encourage someone using a skinner.exe to skin more but also point him to better tools, he/she not only appreciates the program more but just might turn out an unbelievable skin.:p

I completely agree,cos my first two skins (Marko Amp and Lara Amp, were made just for me and my friends,and I uploaded them because I wanted to check how it looked like, I am not a good skinner, but I try to be one,and the only way I can do skins is om skinner or in Paint,anyway, none of my skins reached more than 70 downloads (maybe they have,I didn't check for a while, and just one more thing, the majority of bombers and downraters aren't skinners at all, or make skinner skins.And yeah:).

I am just wondering how the cough cough poster of those little nuggets of niceness would like it if we gave him similar "official" cutting reviews and bombs of his skins??? Hmmmm .... ;)

Most of us have been skinner skinners (:D)
So...
And though I don't like skinner skins there's no need to say 'you're a piece of s**t' ...If the skinner likes it, allright.:D
We have this 'generated'category now, that's enough

Duk - I'm pretty sure he'd get pissed, shoot his mouth off, get banned, and have to change his name. :D

Just bumping this since a lot of recent submission public reviewers are finding their way into this forum. To reiterate what jonesy said: It's not so much the ratings we're pissed about as it is the bashing tone a lot of you take. It's completely unnecessary. I'm not talking about the occasional temper flare, all of us do that. But the cut 'n pasted "GO TO HELL SKINNER.EXE USER ETC. ETC." is pretty annoying to both sides of the argument.

The cut and paste (in general) is annoying to me, but that fact that words of hate are being used just makes it all the worse. Imagine bumping into one of these skinners on the street. Would you really say to them, "I hope you will die!" or some stupid BS like that? Not if you value your life much.

I think the sooner people start handling themselves like they are actually in public and not sitting quietly at home chatting with imaginary imps over a mystical teleportal device, the better off we'll all be. Hrmph!

I agree with MJ, which is why I don't do this kind of thing. I've never gone out of my way to tell a person using skinner.exe to try the next step, unless they specifically start a thread here, because for most people it is just a bit of fun. When I first started skinning, I used a skinner.exe to make a simple skin. I never published it (recognizing that it was utter shite) and immediately deleted it, but it sparked my interest in skinning Winamp. look where I am today - skinning.

I haven't noticed that many blatant "it's a skinner.exe so you deserve to rot in hell" type comments but maybe, that's just my continuous unobservant state. I think most people are good about this until it comes to how it affects their skins, and the Winamp service for them.

I think that people have to realise that although a skinner.exe is just a bit of fun to them, that's all it should and can be. Thus I advocate low ratings for skinner.exe skins. However, I still say no to mean comments.

So: mean comments NO, constructive criticism MAYBE, if requested, ignore it and leave it to the low ratings to tell the story YES

I know it's supposed to be fun but look at it from the other side too, it's pretty frustrating going through the database only to find 40 skinner.exe skins by the same author. and some don't even try to get the pictureplacement right.
I can understand people with no design talent using skinner.exe to make skins, especially when they can't find a skin on a particular subject.
what I don't understand is that people actually download those particular skins.

I do downrate skinner skins sometimes, but usually it's because they think that 1 skin isn't enough so they've uploaded 40 skinner.exe skins that are almost identical, cause IMHO that's just asking for it.

MTG - the point isn't don't criticize. The point is don't bash. Lots of us agree that it can be frustrating. :)

that's a good point...not me anyway

Here is my typical Response to skinner.exe skins

You should customize every component to capture the essence of what your trying to display. Recreating the same button or effect from skinner.exe type applications only puts in the same category as thousands of other skins.

Skin Review Squad - :: Jax ::

And in public reviews I generally, stay away from remarking on them altogether unless the author requests criticism or information on how to make a better skin.

While my response to them is general, I do usually add quite a bit to it to identify where they could improve. I don't say that using the program is stupid....or even that its wrong just that it leaves out the originality of design that we are all looking for in skins. But, to say negative remarks on a review while may be to you or me wrong its neither our place to say yes or no to the individual. After all giving an honest reflection of a piece of art is exactly what we offer here just as we offer the ability to post a skin of your cat,dog or grandma regardless of how you do it. If those are the case then certainly someone taking the approach of reviewing skins that he/she does not personally like is their choice and I can see no wrong in him/her reviewing them according to their taste. Where I do see a problem is when the reviews are not individualized per each piece of work and the author doesn't seem to sense that each skin does differentiate somewhat and as such the reviewing of them should encourage...but, then again that is my feeling and not one I expect anyone else should abide by.

-Joe W. Garrett

Anyone else?

Ok heres what i know

The person posting the dood if you are a skinner.exe person.... is only trying to help the people who are making the the skins (which not all are bad but most are) that are clogging up winamp and just making the good skins harder to find (yes i know about the generated category) and until someone goes back and redoes the recent skin category (roto rooting it out and reorganizing the skins into the proper categories) then its going to be a problem for this time until the good skins fill the recent category up.
*takes a breath*
anyway i do think that if you give constructive criticism in the reviews and people actually read them then it should be allowed. (mad dogs rants and raves arent anything like the dood if you are a skinner.exe person... message the the reviewer is posting) its not like s/hes just saying 00 and thats that but s/he is trying to help so i think s/he is justified :)

Anyway thats what i think.

The recent category will always be there with the 1000 most recently published skins, no matter what category they really are in. That means they are in the category(ies) they are published in (up to 3) AND in the most recent. On a good note: I don't think we have to worry about them (skinner.exe) showing up in the "Top Staff Rated", "Top User Rated" or "Most Downloaded" categories. :D