Linking to WordPress Theme Authors Can Be Dangerous

[espmartin]

Hello,

I agree that keeping a link back from within a Wordpress them to it's author is
fair. But there has come to light an issue that we all need to be aware of.

Check it out: WP Sphere redistributing themes with malicious code | Plain Old Semantic HTML

I kill any encoded scripts on any themes I use. But unfortunately - and this is
for the authors protection - when you remove that code, the theme will
collapse. So I stick to "honest" themes from the "official sites".

[temi]

Martin,
Thanks very much for the heads up in this. Like Skinner I will not be using other people's them any more, will be creating my own theme.

[wakish]

Yeah.. and some themes even have the source encoded which is even unsafe since you don't know what has actually been encoded though the main idea is to prevent removal of linkback to the author..