On The Death of Skinz.org

By Kenray

Let me start by saying a small preamble:

It was my desire to do a greatly detailed, provably factual, highly annotated document of the events leading to, and surrounding, the Death of Skinz.org. Unfortunately, this task proved almost impossible. Forgive me for my shortcomings, and read on…


It became known to most who visited there, at venerable old Skinz.org, that something was definitely gone awry, when a note on the front page of the site pronounced that the Admins were walking.

As a leader in the on-line distribution of custom interface, Skinz was much visited and well respected by most everyone in the community. The very thought of it’s not being there was an affront to sensibility.

And so, as people tend to do,we questioned why.

The answer I was looking for came back on the Skinz.org Message board itself. After a few days of trepidation, the administrators came clean to the world at large.

The admins at the site were basically owed money by the owners of skinz.org, a company called Efront. And the pay was not rolling. On the public boards, admins told a sad and shameful story of a parent company unable/unwilling to pay their debts. What could the admins do, but walk? What would any of us do in such a situation?

And so, to the astonishment of all involved, one afternoon, the staff “left the building” and skinz.org, for all better intents and purposes, “died”.

Community reaction to these events came quickly and harshly. The message boards on the skinz.org site looked like a dictionary of foul language (and the boards still bear much of this scar as this piece is being written). And it didn’t stop there.

As individuals, and in organized groups, skinners deleted their work from the skinz database in protest. (This action was partly undone by a restoration of a backup of the db, to the disgust and astonishment of many).

A thread popped up bearing the title “To the future owners of this database”, in which, former skinz contributors spelled out in plain, legal language, that their art was not to be “profiteered”. Whether or not this will bear any effect in the future is yet to be seen.

Someone at the Efront home published the ICQ logs of an Efront exec. The logs were, to say the least, damaging. Although it was highly illegal and unethical to do so, the publication of these logs gave a much-desired insight to the inner workings and motives of the Efront management...


It is often said that every cloud has a silver lining. If there is an upside to the death of skinz, it is the flood of new skin related sites. Almost overnight, it seemed, there were a host of new sites for the skinning community to visit.

Stardock, the Windowblinds company, financed a new site called Wincustomize.com, with Alexandrie at the helm. Sites like Twohipdudes.com, lotsofskins.com, and even Tek itself became more vital as a great number of skinners went looking for greener pastures.

And furthermore, the scattering of the Skinz faithful led to more activity on other, well-established sites. Deviant Art and Deskmod saw greater activity following the demise of skinz, as the “skinz refugees” sought a new venue for their work, and new places to communicate with each other.

I have, in this writing, proclaimed a death. It is a death of the spirit, surely, because the body remains. Following several “re-directed” days, the “body” of the victim (as of this writing) lies in state, like Stalin in Red Square circa 1975.

You can still get to the skinz.org site, you can still download, upload, comment on the boards if you wish. Someone somewhere posts news to the front page every so often, and the message boards still hum with a low death rattle.


A big "thanks" to the folks who built the Skinz.org site. I, for one, learned a lot there, and got a lot of joy out of it. We are grateful, here at Tek, for all the support thrown our way by the former Administrators of the site. It was a really great run, ya'll.

Kenray, 05-01-01 © Teknidermy 2001