Petteri Pyyny
21 Apr 2002 11:24
Ok, just after we announced that two very popular tools (Streambox VCR and TMPGEnc 12a) will be removed from our site, I have to announce more sad news to you, our dear users.
We have operated our MP3 player skin section for over three years now and it has been fairly successful project, gaining almost 400,000 downloads over three year period. Now, the method how we have added our skins, has raised anger among some skin authors and we have received some very annoying forum posts (like this one) and even more annoying emails from selected "members of skin community" demanding to take their skins off from our site.
And to be honest, I feel kinda sad because of this -- those "artists" hand out their skins for public domain and we add them to our site, selecting the best skins, which eventually gets additional exposure to their "talents" -- 600,000 additional eyeballs a month shouldn't be too bad. And now they demand explanations why we add their skins to our site. Geez.
So, the thing is this:
I'm personally fed up with these so-called artists who offer their work for public and when we offer more exposure to their work through our site without demanding any contribution or effort from them, still giving them proper credits next to each skin what we offer, they complain and threat our site with legal action.
So, my solution is simple. I'm just gonna close the whole skin section as a whole by end of April, 2002.
We may or may not launch a skin focused separate site at some later date, but currently my feelings towards "skin community" as a whole is that I'm just gonna stick with our Blue Dawn skin and remove the rest of the crap from my HDD permanently.
-Petteri 'dRD' Pyyny, webmaster
http://AfterDawn.com/