At 2013-01-24 the skins section of my.opera was disabled and all old Skins are lost, hundreds of hours of the author's creative work are gone. As it is, it is not even possible to download an old skin to reactivate and modernize it without hassle.
edit 2013-02-06
I posted all skins that I found the way described in this post, included direct download links and preview images, IDs and links to the authors "about" pages in this thread in the new Opera Old and Real Skin Forum. Download the linked MHT files and open them locally./edit
Interestingly the skin files themselves are still in their old places, Opera ASA just switched off the customize/skins web page and now redirects all requests to the addons page, however at the time of this post you can only find only 6 instead of the hundreds of skins from the customize pages on the addons page, which is quite pathetic IMHO.
Digging through the Google cache and archive.org pages brought many skins back but there was a problem with archive.org:
They did not save all skins in their archive and some of the links point to default.htm pages.
Solution:
The following little quick'n'dirty Userscript replaces the links in the archive.org pages with the direct links to the Opera server:
// ==UserScript==
// @name Direct Links to Skin Download
// @author QuHno
// @version 1.0
// @description Changes the skin download links inside archive.org to Opera's server
// @published 2013-01-25 07:16
// @include http://*archive.org/*my.opera*
// ==/UserScript==
window.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){
var theLinks = document.querySelectorAll('div.skinpad p.buttons a');
if (theLinks.length === 0){
theLinks = document.querySelectorAll('div.skinpad p.dl a');
}
for (var i = 0, j = theLinks.length; i < j; i++) {
theLinks[i].href = 'http:' + theLinks[i].href.split(':')[2];
}
}, false);
just save it as e.g.
skinArchiveDirectLinks.js into your UserJS folder and start browsing. When the page is finished with downloading you can click on the "download" button and get the skin directly from the Opera server, like it was before.
http://web.archive.org/web/20120607150006/http://my.opera.com/community/customize/skins/tags/is a good point to start.
With the help of this script on the archive.org pages and some additional Google-Fu I was able to "rescue" about
150 270 skins so far. Astonishingly even many older skins from 2009 and earlier still work quite well and need only a little bit of love to make them fully operational for Opera 12+.
If you belong to the creative kind of people:
Download a nice looking skin, try to contact the skin authors of the older skins and ask, if you are allowed to adopt and modernize them, add the (mostly just a few) missing parts and upload them to the addons catalog.
... may be, may be, sometimes the authors will even do it by themselves, if they are reminded that people love their work.
My Opera
).
