[Suggestion] Sub-Categories for "Share Your Creations"

[Alex88]

To help others locate their skins in Share Your Creations so that they can be moved to the correct categories, I take it the fastest way would be to Search for the author name, in the subforum Share Your Creations, and display results as topics?

Ups I see now balala and eclectic-tech both pointed it out, but at least displaying the results as topics should condense it further.

[jsmorley]

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[jsmorley]

These categories are probably not perfect. Suggestions are welcome as you run into things that don't fit...

[Mordasius]

... DA is a dead duck. And good riddance.

DA may be dead as a leading site for graphic art but it is still a much visited repository for Rainmeter Skins. There are 10 to 30 new skins posted every month and the Rainmeter galleries get a steady 14K-17K visits per day (no idea how many of those are bots!).

These categories are probably not perfect. Suggestions are welcome ...

One thing I would suggest is changing the name of the "General" group to "Any other skins" and putting it at the bottom. This might help avoid the situation where "General" gets filled up with everything like weather with clock, music player with visualizer, anime wallpaper changer with time and date, etc. which does not neatly fit in the other categories.

Ahhh... I've just noticed that "General" category currently includes all the previous submissions. I would be tempted to rename and maybe lock that folder as "Older Submissions" and put it at the bottom.

[jsmorley]

DA may be dead as a leading site for graphic art but it is still a much visited repository for Rainmeter Skins. There are 10 to 30 new skins posted every month and the Rainmeter galleries get a steady 14K-17K visits per day (no idea how many of those are bots!).



One thing I would suggest is changing the name of the "General" group to "Any other skins" and putting it at the bottom. This might help avoid the situation where "General" gets filled up with everything like weather with clock, music player with visualizer, anime wallpaper changer with time and date, etc. which does not neatly fit in the other categories.

Ok, I have taken your suggestion...

I take your point about skins that are for instance a Clock with Weather and such. They are not Suites by any means, but don't fit neatly into either "clocks" or "weather", and it might be a mess to put them in both. This is the shortcoming of creating categories like this, and to be honest why we have long avoided it. Hopefully folks will make an attempt to put things in the right place, but if not, that "Other Uncategorized Skins" category will have to do.

As to deviantART, I'm not suggesting that people don't submit their skins there. The only failings of DA since all the changes there are two. First, removing the categories has made it very hard to search for Rainmeter skins without getting a lot of screenshots and other stuff you don't want to wade through. Second, requiring an account to download is unfortunate, although not a huge deal.

[balala]

As to deviantART, I'm not suggesting that people don't submit their skins there. The only failings of DA since all the changes there are two.

In my opinion the only advantage of DA is that it can hold much larger files then this forum. I know this has been discussed more times, but I still believe (but I also understand it's not possible at the moment), that if the allowed file size should be increased, DA would becom absolutely useless from our point of view.

[jsmorley]

In my opinion the only advantage of DA is that it can hold much larger files then this forum. I know this has been discussed more times, but I still believe (but I also understand it's not possible at the moment), that if the allowed file size should be increased, DA would becom absolutely useless from our point of view.

One thing to keep in mind is that you can post here without actually "attaching" the .rmskin to the post. Yes, we have some limits to the space we have available, and I'm hesitant to push our luck with the outstanding, and free, hosting we get from The Open Source Lab at Oregon State University. If an author wants to post a large .rmskin, they can just host the file somewhere else, like DropBox or Google Drive or GitHub or wherever, and just add a link to it in the post.

[pul53dr1v3r]

Nice suggestion by E.T. about the categories and also nice one from Mordasius as General category is in most cases like a recycle bin where anything can be put and hard to find what one is looking for.

One more suggestion would be to rename the main category name "Share your creations" to sth like "Rainmeter creations", "Rainmeters skins", "Rainmeter gadgets", "Shared creations" or any other name that is more "neutral" as the current one is mostly creators oriented, so the others could suffer to find the creations/gadgets.
The creators know the forum and its order well, but not sure about many simple users, newbies who enter the site for the first time.
Someone could think the topic is just for the creators and not worth entering it for him.

[balala]

One thing to keep in mind is that you can post here without actually "attaching" the .rmskin to the post. Yes, we have some limits to the space we have available, and I'm hesitant to push our luck with the outstanding, and free, hosting we get from The Open Source Lab at Oregon State University. If an author wants to post a large .rmskin, they can just host the file somewhere else, like DropBox or Google Drive or GitHub or wherever, and just add a link to it in the post.

Don't argue, good point.

[jsmorley]

I think those of us who are moderators should go ahead and start moving the skins piled up in Other Uncategorized Skins into the proper categories as we have time. If we all just do a few a day, we can get there pretty soon.

I think these categories are of minimal value with 90% or more of the skins uncategorized.

If you are not sure where a skin fits, then just leave it, but I suspect that a large percentage of them are fairly obvious.

If an author disagrees with where we move a skin, they can just post a reply on the thread asking for it to be moved somewhere else.