I've received some pretty nasty emails lately about the skin copying and stealing spree that's been going on around here. For various reasons, I haven't been keeping a very good eye on this site, and I do share a certain amount of blame for not doing something more about this. But to be fair, I'm not the one stealing designs. I'm not the one putting them up on the site. I'm not the immature loser who thinks it's hilarious to piss other people off. Those are the people you should be angry with, not me.

If you'll notice in the upper right-hand corner of this page there are over 2,000 skins on this site. The vast, vast majority of them were posted by someone other than me. I can't possibly keep an eye on each and every one of them. And I know I get complaints about the specific ones that are copies, but if you saw what my inbox looked like, you'd forgive me for missing the complaints. Plus, people fill out complaints about skins and put stuff in there like, "How do I download this?" and "How come the picture doesn't work?" That's not what the form's for.

This site is also a community. With community features. Like rankings. You'll notice that people routinely rank copied skins with 0 stars. This is a control. People don't download (or even look at) skins with 0 stars. They also post comments on the skin saying it's copied. People don't download skins that people say are copied. Apparently that's not enough. So I require that you have a valid email address before posting a skin, so that people are discouraged from copying. But apparently that's not enough either.

I'm a professional programmer, so I believe there's a programmable solution to every problem. And since this is a community site, there's a programmable, community solution to every problem. So now when you fill out a complaint form for a skin, that complaint gets recorded in addition to getting sent to me. And then a complicated algorithm decides when to disable certain skins based on complaints. You, the BlogSkins member, decides when a skin gets disabled for being a copy. Because there's 77,700 of you, and only one of me.

Let's see how this goes.