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deviantART is changing...

Release announcements and important news from the developers.
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jsmorley
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Re: deviantART is changing...

Post by jsmorley »

balala wrote: February 2nd, 2020, 1:58 pm What about my idea to use the Rainmeter forum itself, instead of looking for a site to host the skins? As said the only obstacle is the allowed size of the uploaded file.
There is really no way to wrangle the format of "forum" software to provide the kind of display and organization that we would want. It's really just not the right tool for the right job.

Forum software by it's nature is chronological in order, and is organized in threads of posts that while they can have a Subject line, can't have any "preview image" or any other way for folks to just scroll through a "gallery" of skins that have been attached. It's really not a good way to "browse" or even "search for" a skin that appeals to you.

I think the "Share Your Creations" forum area is very useful, and I encourage folks to create posts with attached images and links to their completed .rmskin creations for the community to share, but it's a far cry from what is needed to properly support the many, many thousands of skins that are out there.

In any case, we really just don't have the storage space to encourage ALL the skins out there to be attached to posts in the forums or otherwise uploaded to our site. Our available space is measured in a low-order number of Gigabytes, and we have already had to go hat-in-hand to The Open Source Lab at Oregon State University asking for a bit more space in order to support the boatloads of images that are attached to posts. There is a limit to what they are going to want to provide.

There are some limits on the size of an individual attachment that is both a function of our wanting to keep space usage under some control, and also a limitation of the normal setting for the underlying PHP infrastructure that runs the software. That is currently at 10 Megabytes per attachment, and we would be hesitant to increase that by much. If you want to provide a download of a .rmksin larger than that, you need to do it as a "link" to someplace you are hosting it.

In my view deviantART continues to be the best alternative for a central place to host the community's skins for sharing. The new interface has added some challenges to this, but if we all get in the habit of "tagging" submissions properly, in some consistent fashion, it can make browsing and searching for skins there almost as easy and effective as it use to be. For instance, if EVERY skin that was submitted there was "tagged" with "rainmeter" and ".rmskin" at a minimum, with additional optional tags like "weather" or "clock" or whatever, then users could pretty easily find just skins, by searching for "rainmeter" and ".rmskin", while not getting the boatload of images of desktops and other assorted "art" that isn't what you had in mind when looking for the latest or greatest skin for your needs.

I currently hit the site with https://www.deviantart.com/search/deviations?order=most-recent&q=rainmeter, which isn't perfect, but gets me in the ballpark. I get a lot of "images" as well as "skins", and they can be hard to distinguish at first glance. If all submissions were tagged with ".rmkin" as well, that would really help. Just not sure there is a good way to get this advice out to the rest of the Rainmeter world that isn't active on these forums, and I doubt much could be done about the huge number of skins that are already there. A great many of those authors are no longer even around.
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balala
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Re: deviantART is changing...

Post by balala »

jsmorley wrote: February 2nd, 2020, 2:03 pm There is really no way to wrangle the format of "forum" software to provide the kind of display and organization that we would want. It's really just not the right tool for the right job.

Forum software by it's nature is chronological in order, and is organized in threads of posts that while they can have a Subject line, can't have any "preview image" or any other way for folks to just scroll through a "gallery" of skins that have been attached. It's really not a good way to "browse" or even "search for" a skin that appeals to you.
Neither the chronological order, nor the threads are not a problem when users search through the forum. And there can be posted images, even more. Even if it's not possible to scroll them, most users can find a solution to post not too much, but very representative images of their skin(s).
jsmorley wrote: February 2nd, 2020, 2:03 pm In any case, we really just don't have the storage space to encourage ALL the skins out there to be attached to posts in the forums or otherwise uploaded to our site. Our available space is measured in a low-order number of Gigabytes, and we have already had to go hat-in-hand to The Open Source Lab at Oregon State University asking for a bit more space in order to support the boatloads of images that are attached to posts. There is a limit to what they are going to want to provide.

There are some limits on the size of an individual attachment that is both a function of our wanting to keep space usage under some control, and also a limitation of the normal setting for the underlying PHP infrastructure that runs the software. That is currently at 10 Megabytes per attachment, and we would be hesitant to increase that by much. If you want to provide a download of a .rmksin larger than that, you need to do it as a "link" to someplace you are hosting it.
This is a real problem. No more comments about this...
jsmorley wrote: February 2nd, 2020, 2:03 pm In my view deviantART continues to be the best alternative for a central place to host the community's skins for sharing.
DeviantArt has became sucks (sorry). To be honest, I hate its new look.
epickittengo
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Re: deviantART is changing...

Post by epickittengo »

for the app, the categories tab is gone. due to the new update. and also deviantations will repeat if u scroll down sometimes. so when i go search somthing, there is no filter/categories tab. so i cant do: exsample-manga-japanese. sucks
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fonpaolo
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Re: deviantART is changing...

Post by fonpaolo »

Oh well... now this!

Not only in recent years deviantart has become worse and worse, full of spam and not only... :x
...or maybe I'm lucky and the rare times I went there it was always like that.

Now you can't download if you're not a registered user? :twisted:

I think I've to find another site. :thumbdown:

Sorry for the rant.
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raiguard
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Re: deviantART is changing...

Post by raiguard »

A dedicated site for Rainmeter skins, built and run by the community, would probably be the best and longest-lasting solution. Unfortunately it's been tried, and has failed every time. Maybe it's worth another shot?

In the meantime, this forum is decently good for that. I host all of my skins here, and get most of my downloads from here.
”We are pretty sure that r2922 resolves the regression in resolution caused by a reversion to a revision.” - jsmorley, 2017
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fonpaolo
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Re: deviantART is changing...

Post by fonpaolo »

Yes, let's hope this time is the right one, but I need to reduce the number of images in my rmskin, to stay within file size limits, last time it was 16 Mb!
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balala
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Re: deviantART is changing...

Post by balala »

raiguard wrote: April 4th, 2020, 9:37 pm In the meantime, this forum is decently good for that. I host all of my skins here, and get most of my downloads from here.
The only inconvenient is the size of the hosted files. This has an upper limit, somewhere around a few MB. This is a great disadvantage, otherwise it indeed would be excelent.
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jsmorley
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Re: deviantART is changing...

Post by jsmorley »

balala wrote: April 5th, 2020, 9:36 am The only inconvenient is the size of the hosted files. This has an upper limit, somewhere around a few MB. This is a great disadvantage, otherwise it indeed would be excelent.
Yes, the limit is 10mb. We have somewhat limited overall drive space, and really can't afford to be the "repository" for all the many thousands of skins out there.
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balala
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Re: deviantART is changing...

Post by balala »

jsmorley wrote: April 5th, 2020, 11:59 am Yes, the limit is 10mb. We have somewhat limited overall drive space, and really can't afford to be the "repository" for all the many thousands of skins out there.
Yes, we've discussed this a few times before. I knew there is a limit, was not sure what is its value, but knew the limit does exist.
And understand the reason why it can't be enlarged. It's alright from my point of view, even if I also think this would be the easiest and most affordable way to solve the issue induced by the change of DeviantArt.
That's it for now...
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jsmorley
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Re: deviantART is changing...

Post by jsmorley »

I think 10mb should be enough to capture the needs of most authors, there are relatively few that have so many images or other large resource files that they exceed that.

If you do have a skin that is over 10mb, simply host it on DropBox or Google Drive or someplace else, and post a link to it in Share Your Creations.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/mj4v3p6cz121w9d/MonaLisa_1.0.rmskin?dl=1

When you right-click the file in your DropBox folder, and select "Copy DropBox Link" from the context menu, simply change dl=0 to dl=1 when you post the link. That will make it a one-step seamless download for the person clicking it.