The restoration of the skin archives is nearly complete. You'll notice that about 95% of the skins, themes, and wallpapers are now back. We'll be posting a list of people who helped us out with our thanks!

We are still left with a few minor challenges.

1) We are missing a few files still that we will hopefully be able to get back.

2) We are down 2 high speed servers. Some of this is on warranty so we'll be able to get them back. Technically, it's amazing we're ven up right now.  But clearly more redundancy is needed.

Issue #2 really should be discussed as a community issue. Let me talk numbers: In January 2003 this site got just over a milliion visitors per month.  Last month, despite the libraries being down for a couple of days this site still got over 2 million unique visitors.  In short, we doubled our size and continue to grow at a huge rate.

This is good. Except it does means we need more hardware. So in a few days, we're going to start a subscription drive with the goal of getting 500 new subscriptions (500 people out of 2 million uniques) by the end of the year. If you've already purchased a subscription, you've done your part and you have our thanks. But of the 1.998 million who haven't, hopefully some of them will be willing to help us out.  WIth 500 new subscriptions we'll be able to bring in 2 new servers and provide instant redundancy so that future disasters can be averted.

We will also display on the site how close we are to meeting that goal.  So all subscriptions starting tonight at 10pm EST and on will be counted towards the subscription drive.  A WinCustomize subscription lasts TWO years and is only $20. That's less than $1 per month. It gets you all kinds of extra software goodies, unlimited bandwidth use, a couple of premium suites and helps the site.

Thanks for all your help. We'll keep you posted! If you see any missing skins or themes at this point, if you have them please consider submitting them (screenshot will still be needed too).

We'd like to thank Pat (T-Man) and Kris (Nakor) and Nate Mook (owner of Betanews.com who is also our IT god in LA) for all their hard work in getting things back in order.