After some discussion we have decided to bring back Skin of the Quarter Season. This is a reincarnation of our old Skin of the Month contests, just a bit more spread out.

The plan so far is to have a one month nomination period after each quarter of the year. We will only be accepting nominations of skins that were submitted to DeviantArt within that quarter of the year. We're hoping this will encourage the creation of new skins. Because of a limitation to the number of items we can place on a single pole, we the moderators reserve the right to whittle down the competition before voting.

After nominations are closed we will have one week of voting. There may even be a prize for the winner.

As of this blog the rules are as follows:

• A Skin of the Quarter must be released during the time period of the poll.


• There is a technical limit of 10 suggestions per poll. Suggestions exceeding this limit may be decided upon by the moderators.


• You cannot suggest your own skins or suites.


• The suggestion must be uploaded to deviantART and must be available in the .rmskin format.

Look for more information around July.

~smurfier

Some of you might be wondering what happened to that deviation you submitted to the group earlier this month.

The short answer is that the gallery moderation is done entirely by volunteers, who have lives outside the internet... and we may have let the number of submissions get away from us a bit. We dropped the ball, so to speak.

Rather sorry about that, but what happened, happened.

A sizable pile of submission requests from mid-March have expired.  I'm going to try to get things caught up today, but if you submitted to the gallery earlier this month and your request expired, you'll need to resubmit if you haven't done so already.  Please try to confirm that the request actually expired before submitting again - a flood of duplicate requests is not going to help us get things back on track.

Just by way of a reminder, you might want to read up on the Submission Rules.  (Obviously, moderating the gallery is faster the less actual moderating we have to do... so the fastest way to get your work into the gallery is to make sure you follow the Submission Rules.)  By far, our biggest issues are:

1) Skins are packaged incorrectly
(Here's how to create a .rmskin package)

2) Screenshots do not include credits for the resources used.  We all upload our hard work for everyone else to use - the least you can do is link back to us when you use it in a screenshot.    Also, when we're looking at your awesome screenshot, its great to be able to know where you got that cool clock so we can get it ourselves!

3) Deviations are submitted to the wrong folder (this isn't technically against the submission rules, but it really helps us moderators if we don't have to move things around)


That's pretty much it.  Thank you all for sharing your creativity with the community and making Rainmeter as awesome as it is!

Rainmeter 2.5 has been released. Many improvements have been made such as the new FileView plugin, more mouse actions, updates to the InputText plugin and many more.

Read more at the Release Notes and download the Release from Rainmeter.net.

~smurfier