quote:
Originally posted by Willz
I'm sure Menthix will be able to back me up here, because the majority of rips that happen don't even touch the UIFiles at all.
For example:
Menthix's reply to x-men origin wolverine skin plus 2009. After that post I got several more rips based on that one, just replacing images.
But I'm not sure if not extracting the skins will really make a difference. If people need to compress their skins to make a package, people will also know how to decompress existing packages. The flood of rips I linked to seems to originate from a
"tutorial", which is in fact directly a rip of an early version of
Ryddyck's Windows 7 Skin. It only takes 1 tutorial/post on a popular site describing how to bypass whatever obfuscation is put in place, and people are back to ripping as usual.
If using encoded UIBs or no unpacking are easy changes, sure, it may help a bit. But I rather see energy put in to making the skinning engine better and making it easier for people to learn skinning. That includes proper tutorials which will actually teach people what they're doing instead of showing them how to replace images. I can add new tutorials on the site and promote them.
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