Mega Champ

I have all my respect for those great guys and gals who do so much hardwork and release those amazing,beautiful wordpress themes for free to the world. And that is why you will see so many wordpress themes directory sites popping up each day, who also do the hard work for you by collecting all free themes in one place. So, last week i was looking for a decent theme for a new website of mine, when i came across one on a pretty popular theme directory site. So, i downloaded it and was fooling with the theme settings.

People with some php knowledge must have seen nowadays that wordpress theme creators are now encrypting their footers, so that people are not able to remove them easily(And i really despise + hate those who download the free theme and still don’t have the courtesy of keeping creator link alive). But there was a problem, i had to modify the theme footer to add some text but it was encrypted. I do have a decent knowledge of php, so i found out a way to decrypt the footer but then came the shocking surprise. In the footer, there was a link included to a site and it was invisible, i mean you won’t be able to see link on the screen but once you do the view source, you would find it to be there.

I was enraged seriously, i thought of going to the theme owner website and give him a piece of my mind, but i did wanted to try this one thing. I went to theme owner website and downloaded the theme again. Checked the same footer code in this one also and now I found out, the theme from the owners website was not having that spammy link.

So, the picture was all clear, it was the work of that wordpress theme directory owner, who was including his own links in other people themes. And mind you this directory comes on the first page of google for the keyword ” wordpress themes” . So, they must be getting 100′s of links on daily basis by using this scam.

So, from next time please download the theme from original theme creator or owners website, just to be on safer side.

I am a member of a popular freelancing website and whenever i find some free time, i go there to get some projects which inturn increases my programming knowledge and also gives me some extra cash. But even if i can’t pick up any projects due to time constraints i still check out the project listings once in 2 days.

Off lately i am noticing a huge increase of a trend, someone Mr Fraud will come and post a project “i want a clone of website abc.com(gives the name website)” or ” i want a clone of website like abc.com, please go there and register and check out all the functionalties before bidding” etc etc.

And that Mr Fraud will always be new to the freelancing website and wont be having any reviews at all. I am not saying that reviews are very important and every new project publisher is fraud, I am just talking about a breed, who will post the projects like mentioned by me above. And Mr Fraud also gives out a huge budget for the project like for simple website he will put some $1000, which is pretty much tempting for all the programmers. And they keep on coming, visiting the website given by Mr Fraud, registering, placing bids etc.

What these programmers don’t know that all Mr Fraud is doing is just increasing the page views for his new website, or increasing the no. of registered users or even he is increasing the number of leads for some products he is promoting(as he told programmers to register and stuff). So, no programmer is getting that project as Mr Fraud never comes back and moves on to another freelancing website or to some other dirty tricks of his.

And I am not saying all this by looking at a 1-2 projects, i have been around that freelancing website for almost 2 years now, and almost everyday some new Mr Fraud comes up with atleast 5-6 projects on that website alone. And for sure he must be doing this stuff for lots of freelancing sites.

Was I a victim of this, well yes in starting i did get tricked, but with time i learned and today by seeing the project and description I can make out(with 99% hit rate) that Mr Fraud is back with some new scam of his.