No longer recommending Customize.org
Posted: January 4th, 2016, 2:01 pm
The sad current state of Customize.org
Customize.org has long been a great community to share desktop customization files, like skins for Rainmeter, Winamp, Bumptop and others, themes for Windows, wallpapers, icons, you name it.
However, the owner and creator of the site, who I won't drag into this publicly, has long ago moved on to other things, and the site has pretty much been on auto-pilot.
What this has caused is a site that for the last couple of years has been petty much 99.9% advertising spam as new submissions.
About a year ago, when advertising and malware was causing some grief there in the "Rainmeter" section, we were able to contact the owner, and he changed it so that new submissions to the Rainmeter area had to be "approved" by an admin before they were visible. He gave admin rights to several people active in the Rainmeter community.
While the rest of the site was still 90% spam, we were able to keep the Rainmeter area clean and safe.
Sadly, someone has hacked the server / site in some fashion in the last month or so. All admin accounts have been "banned", all @customize.org contact emails for the owner have been disabled, and in effect the entire site is in the hands of the bad guys. As far as the Rainmeter area, while what is currently there seems ok, no new submissions can ever be "approved". Don't bother posting there, as nobody will ever see it.
We have unsuccessfully attempted to contact the owner through other means, but it just looks like the site is entirely unattended and on its own. This is not a good thing...
We just can't recommend that anyone download or use skins from that site anymore. We just can't have any way to be sure you are getting something safe.
We have removed Customize.org from our Discover page on the main site. We continue to recommend deviantART as the best place to host and download skins for Rainmeter.
Customize.org has long been a great community to share desktop customization files, like skins for Rainmeter, Winamp, Bumptop and others, themes for Windows, wallpapers, icons, you name it.
However, the owner and creator of the site, who I won't drag into this publicly, has long ago moved on to other things, and the site has pretty much been on auto-pilot.
What this has caused is a site that for the last couple of years has been petty much 99.9% advertising spam as new submissions.
About a year ago, when advertising and malware was causing some grief there in the "Rainmeter" section, we were able to contact the owner, and he changed it so that new submissions to the Rainmeter area had to be "approved" by an admin before they were visible. He gave admin rights to several people active in the Rainmeter community.
While the rest of the site was still 90% spam, we were able to keep the Rainmeter area clean and safe.
Sadly, someone has hacked the server / site in some fashion in the last month or so. All admin accounts have been "banned", all @customize.org contact emails for the owner have been disabled, and in effect the entire site is in the hands of the bad guys. As far as the Rainmeter area, while what is currently there seems ok, no new submissions can ever be "approved". Don't bother posting there, as nobody will ever see it.
We have unsuccessfully attempted to contact the owner through other means, but it just looks like the site is entirely unattended and on its own. This is not a good thing...
We just can't recommend that anyone download or use skins from that site anymore. We just can't have any way to be sure you are getting something safe.
We have removed Customize.org from our Discover page on the main site. We continue to recommend deviantART as the best place to host and download skins for Rainmeter.