deviantART is changing...

[balala]

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.

Good idea and good to be known. This makes things easier as far as i can tell, because the new design (and functioning) of DeviantArt is...
Well, let's say it's not the best.

[SilverAzide]

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.

Ooo, great tip! I'm thinking this is a nice alternative to DA and I may switch to this method. The DA changes are such that I would suggest that no one visit that site while at work since it is trivial for NSFW images to show up in a search, plus the requirement to be a member to download anything is a huge deterrent to anyone finding something on DA with a Google search. Perhaps I'll keep my DA page as "art", but just embed the download link in the description text (assuming they won't start stripping out off-site links).

[balala]

Ooo, great tip! I'm thinking this is a nice alternative to DA and I may switch to this method. The DA changes are such that I would suggest that no one visit that site while at work since it is trivial for NSFW images to show up in a search, plus the requirement to be a member to download anything is a huge deterrent to anyone finding something on DA with a Google search. Perhaps I'll keep my DA page as "art", but just embed the download link in the description text (assuming they won't start stripping out off-site links).

Although I think it's not a huge disadvantage being able to download only as member, I completely agree. DeviantArt became a shit (sorry).

[raiguard]

Another solution to the file size is to host them on GitHub. I do github releases for my skins, then the download link on the forum links to the file on GitHub's server.

That aside, there is another issue, that of explorability. Skins that don't become popular, or that don't have much discussion surrounding them, quickly get buried. There's not really a way to avoid this.

Perhaps Share your Creations could be expanded with subforums for specific kinds of skins or something?

[jsmorley]

Another solution to the file size is to host them on GitHub. I do github releases for my skins, then the download link on the forum links to the file on GitHub's server.

That aside, there is another issue, that of explorability. Skins that don't become popular, or that don't have much discussion surrounding them, quickly get buried. There's not really a way to avoid this.

Perhaps Share your Creations could be expanded with subforums for specific kinds of skins or something?

No, phpBB and the forums are just not a good mechanism for a searchable "repository" for anything. The forums are by their nature a chronological "conversation" platform. So aside from the space constraints that we have on our system in general, phpBB is just not a satisfactory tool for the job. To be honest, I don't see a decent repository / gallery site for skins in our future. While each individual skin is not large, the aggregate of the many, many thousands of skins out there would require storage space in the multiple terabytes, and a pretty significant amount of processing power and bandwidth. I don't see a reason why anyone would take this on without some significant remuneration, probably in the form of advertising or subscriptions, which we would just reject out of hand.

deviantART started as a "labor of love" as well, but they very soon realized that the staff and infrastructure they needed to support it, and obtaining the kind of effort and commitment needed to maintain it, slowly evolved the labor of love into a cold blooded business. That was inevitable if regrettable.

It's just a fact that anything that requires an effort by one or more people in what approaches a "full time" way, means it must provide at least a fair and sufficient "living" to those people. Then of course, everyone wants a "raise" from time to time, don't they? Health insurance? Paid vacation? Taxes for the government?

That is a road we are not going down. Not now, not ever. This will continue to be a fully volunteer, community effort, where people get involved because they enjoy it, work as hard as they can in their spare time until they burn out and start talking to themselves, themselves, themselves, and then we just shrug, fondly remember them about as much as yesterday's newspaper, and hope someone else comes along...

[jsmorley]

Keep in mind what would be required to have something that was even the most pale imitation of what deviantART does.

It would require enough drive space for a boatload of .rmskin files and preview images.
It would require enough processing power to support the searches, and enough bandwidth to support all the downloading.

It would need to require a login, or it would be entirely full of spam and ads for porno and Viagra within hours. Literally hours.
This means it would require a method, and one or more people, to manage these accounts, see porno and Viagra above.

It would require software that would allow organization and searching by at least "name", "category", "author", "date", "popularity". Probably others.

It would need to allow "submissions" to be created, edited and deleted. A submission is a combination of the file, one or more preview images, and a pretty robust description.

It would need to allow "comments" to be created, edited and deleted on the submission by other users. Code boxes, images, quoting, text formatting, all the same kind of things you see in the forum would be needed.

It would require one or more people to check and validate all submissions, and moderate comments. See porno and Viagra above.

It would need to gather and track statistics about how many times things are viewed and downloaded.

It would require both software tools, and actual people, to monitor, maintain and manage things. Customize.org is a perfect example of how quickly it can all go wrong if it is not carefully managed. It's a lot more work than you might think just to keep these forums from spinning out of control.

https://forum.rainmeter.net/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=34039&start=20#p171034

[SilverAzide]

The latest news from DA:

https://www.deviantartsupport.com/en/article/new-deviantart-launch-late-may

[Mordasius]

The Rainmeter Galleries on Deviant Art are ticking over at 12-15K views per day which is around double the number before the lockdowns.

Even though I still view DA in the old format, I don't think it would be the wise to abandon DA as a repository for Rainmeter Skins when we are all forced over to the Eclipse format on or around 20th May. We'll just wait and see how many people continue to find their way to the Rainmeter Galleries.

We are far from the only ones sad to see DA hopelessly trying to turn itself into an ArtStation look and feel alike. I feel particularly sorry for those that forked out $50 for a year of core-membership.

Some of you might like to join the Three-day Sound of Silence Protest. It won't make the slightest difference to DA's plans to change but it won't do any harm either.

[jsmorley]

I would agree. I think at least for now, the best thing is to continue to submit your skins to deviantART. The biggest problem right now is that the idea of discrete "categories" has gone away, so it can be very hard to have your skin jump out to a user of the site looking for Rainmeter skins. The best thing here is to be sure to submit your deviation to the Rainmeter "Group" when you create it, so it will show up in the Skins Galleries.

https://www.deviantart.com/rainmeter/gallery/23941137/skins

Then we can just encourage that link for users searching for skins.

[MikeG621]

I've continued to use the old format, but for the few minutes it tried to force Eclipse on me I didn't see a way to filter based on timeframe. I like to use the "within the last week" filters to weed out the all-time-most-popular and submitted-five-minutes-ago stuff.