I have the forums up. They may get altered/changed/whatever still, but try them out for now. I'm gonna change the look as soon as I get the chance. The forum is over here.

The number 1 downloaded skin up until a few minutes ago was one that got there illegitimately. It seems that the author of the skin downloaded it 290 times in order to improve his or her ranking. Not cool. I restored the number of downloads on the skin to what it should be (although I shoulda just deleted the skin) and I wrote a fix to block skin authors from downloading their own skins. I wish I didn't have to, but apparently I do.

Thanks to an eagle-eyed (and slightly paranoid?) BlogSkins user for the head's up on this. You know who you are.

Here's what I've done about the signup errors. Since so many people were having the same problems, I made a catch-all, do-it-yourself, override solution. If you enter your information in to signup and it fails, you are presented with a much clearer, more comprehensive set of explanatory messages. If those do not help you solve your signup problem, then you are given the choice of overriding the error checks. This will insert your account into the blogskins database, but it means that you'll probably have problems previewing and applying skins. But, at least you can login and post skins. I'll keep working on the other problems.

Related to this solution, everyone (logged in or not), can use the "BlogSkins Preview Blog" to preview skins. So, if the system can't retrieve your list of blogs, at least you can preview it with something.

Lastly, I'm working on the forum thing. It should be up soon.

I don't know how I missed it, but we got mentioned over on Webmonkey's Monkey Bites. They don't have perma-links, so look for the entry on March 5th. Webmonkey has been extremely helpful to me over the years in learning my web development skillz. It's kinda weird to have them linking something that I've done now.