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.