Apocalypse Now?
By Kenray

This article originally began some weeks back, as our Eulogy for Deskmod, . I have left that Eulogy intact, below. But in the weeks following the disappearance of Dmod, there has been a spate of disappearances in the skinning world, making it necessary for me to return to this piece.

Not only did we lose Dmod, and the sites it hosted, we have also lost Lotsofskins.com. Relatively speaking, LOS was a quite a bit smaller than Dmod, but, at the time of it's disappearance, it did have over a thousand skins, an active messageboard, and a bright and active group of users.

And let's be for real here: We can't afford to lose any skinners' site!

With the loss of Dmod and LOS, and with the passing of Skinz.org a while back, we are left with only one Major Player in the skinning world: Deviant Art. Notably, we still have Skinbase.org and Wincustomize.com, for which we are thankful. But as far as sites with the kind of activity and data that we are all so handsomely accustomed, we are down to one.

What a precarious position our little community is in now! As artilces in newpapers and national magazines "turn people on" to skinning, and as it has been predicted that WinXP will turn on millions more, our future hangs by a thin thread, that seems to get thinner and thinner all the time...

So, what of our future?

And by "our future", i mean "ours" as in: real practicing skinners. Sure, yer little brother can get a Britney skin for winamp at 1001winampskins.com, and your mom can get beautiful wallpapers at digitalblasphemy.com, but what about "us"?

If something were to happen to DA, where would "we" be?

A Modest Proposal

When WC started out, it was proposed to be a "portal" to other skinning sites. This, as an idea, is brilliant, and most likely, our only real hope. But in order to work, this idea has to be brought to a much greater fuition than previously considered.

It has become painfully obvious, over the past two or three months, just how dangerous it is to put "all of our eggs in one basket". And there is a simple solution. The obvious direction for us to turn is that of the "cell", a model which has served guerilla warriors well in the past, and could serve us all well in the future.

Imagine with me now, a true "Skin Portal Site" built in a "cell" model:

You and I, and every other skinner worth their salt, upload their skins to their own webspace, independent of any other skinner, or website. We post a Zipfile containing our skins' images and other necessary files. We also post to our own webspace, a screenshot of the skin, just as we are used to doing.

Now, here's the trick: instead of uploading those files to a "skinning website", all we do is upload links to them. The "Portal Site" provides pretty much the same services any big skin site has ever provided, with the notable exception that it is only showing our skins by linking to what we have published on our own sites.

If my site goes down, you lose my skins, but the rest of the site remains undisturbed. Since links are nothing but textual information, you could back-up a site like this in moments (every damn day).

The one time I heard this concept mentioned in a public forum, the main complaint brought against the idea was: broken links. Well, simple, friend, get a spider. If any link was broken for more than 2 days, poof, removed.

This is the safest, most practical, most likely future of skin sites, in my honest opinion. Banner ad revenues won't cut major bandwidth expenses anymore, people still won't pay to download skins, and "charity" models barely even work to save starving human beings, much less websites.

So it's the cellular model or: The Feds.

Here is another alternative, one I have mentioned, but not had the resources (as of yet) to fully persue:

If it is not expressly stated already, then it should be expressly implied that one function of a Higher Learning Institution should be to document, and where possible, preserve the artifacts of this great and historical grassroots art movement known as "skinning". Especially if that Insttitution gets money from "the People" by way of Taxes.

In America, Universities have their own internet, dubbed the "www2", which exists for their use exclusively. Even a small state school, like UNC (Chapel Hill, North Carolina), has more than enough resources to provide a proper repository.

They have ample bandwidth, storage space, and student body knowledge to accomplish what Jark, at seventeen years old, has done for himself. And by goodness, they are taking tax money from me, kenray, personally, thru my state income, and I could well use to get soemthing useful for it. And of course, a big school, like MIT or Stanford could achieve the goal with ease...

I don't really "cherish" the idea of hitting a "dot edu" domain for skins, and i can imagine all sorts of weird regulatory hang ups in the way, but it would be much more preferable to live with that than to to find another database of skin art lost forever.

One way or another, we as a community should seek new and innovative solutions for the sharing and display of our craft. History is happening now, and every time we lose another database, a part of ourselves is gone forever.

And there is a painfully obvious distinction between a "tagedy" and a "shame".

On the Death of Deskmod

It was with great sadness that we all read the news on sites all round the skinning circle. In a flash, and with a stunning permanence, venerable Deskmod was gone.

Unlike the earlier demise of Skinz.org, Deskmod left no walking corpse, and there would be no protested restorations of that great database of the skinning art. There were no great conflagrations an a ghost of a messageboard, no vying for control as the ship sailed to the bottom. In one great fell swoop, like the City of Atlantis, Deskmod disappeared forever in a single day.

The entire crew left there heartfelt good-byes where once the great site stood. As of this writing, all the details of the events, and the collected eulogies of the staff were available to the world at large on the remaining page at www.deskmod.com.

The death was a simple one. A sheer heart attack, and the family of the victim could not afford the Life Support bills, so the patient drifted into the Netherworld suddenly and quietly.

Gorman recounted the "moment of impact":

"DeskMod reached its high this spring, with some days reaching near half a million page views per day, and at the same time, we began to be entrenched with problems.

Those problems ranged from simple code errors which caused slight database corruption to one of our servers crashing every other day. We worked tirelessly day and night to correct these issues, but they seemed to become stronger the more we tried to repair them. On May 23rd an event we had always feared happening, happened. We had encountered massive data loss. We had lost all uploads, hosted sites, DNS, mail, much more.

After figuring out how much it would cost to have all of the data restored, and looking at our current finances, we could simply not make this happen. Having this much data restored would cost thousands of dollars which we didn’t have to spend. After having meetings with the entire staff all day we had come up with various game plans for how to handle this situation. Without any files, what is DeskMod? Nothing. So in all, this should be definite proof for everyone that without all of our wonderful members, DeskMod would have been nothing. After we came to the decision that restoring the data was not a viable option, we all knew the end was here."

And the family, meaning all of us, would not see the end of the tragedy there. Deskmod hosted 545 Studios as well as LowDimension, and when Dmod disappeared, so did these other sites.

(LowDimension has a DL site for SharpE, and a promise to return with the full list of their apps.
545 promises to return to the web in September.)

We here at Teknidermy have a great sense of loss, especially since Gorman gave us one of our very first (and by far most controversial and engaging) interviews in Tek edition Number One. Deskmod had a bright and active messageboard, and a large group of "regulars".

With heavy hearts and solemn faces, we bravely wave good-bye to Dmod....

...which bring s up an important topic:

Where will this all end?

It seems that we are seeing a spate of "success-related" deaths in and around the skinning community. As skinning grows in popularity, and more and more people become involved, the challenges of financially supporting this mostly-freeware movement become life-threateningly crucial.

The more visitors a site gets, the more bandwidth it eats, and the more it costs. Since the bottom fell out of the online advertising market, many sites have sharply felt the pinch of the almighty budget. Gorman spelled it out quite plainly in his Requiem at Deskmod, saying:

"After putting tens of thousands of dollars into the site, and not at least breaking even in many months, the financial aspect of this all is definitely the reason for the closure of DeskMod. "

Cost Vs. Income, the great dilemma, is the reality at hand. The shockwave of this reality has turned up a few shards of flotsam in the surf so far. On their messageboards, Wincustomize announced that it would sell CDROMs with exclusive skins and site archives in order to raise funds. The Amazonian "volunteer philanthropy" concept has been discussed in some places.

The truth is becoming clearer every day. As our little community expands, we will, like any other large community, be forced to develop an infrastructure to ensure our continued healthy growth and well being. Who will come forth with this new model? How long can the big sites go on? What will happen to our favorite small "islands in the surf" when XP delivers great numbers of the unwashed to our fragile shores?

Only time will tell.....

If you have not already, please take the time to read the departing memoirs of the Deskmod staff.

To paraphrase the late Douglas Adams:

"So long, and thanks for all the skins."

Deskmod, 1999 - 2001

Kenray, 07-01-01 © Teknidermy 2001