“Forced” Ads That Can’t Be Removed Suck

Saturday April 26, 2008 

The other day I started looking for a new theme to use here at RTdN because I’d paid for the theme that was currently installed, and I wanted to use it on a different site.   So the hunt began for a new look.

I thought that I’d found one, and I made it the active theme for a few hours while I worked on getting my ads configured in the footer.  But when I opened the footer.php file, I was greeted with a copyright notice and a warning that any attempt to reverse engineer or decrypt the file was prohibited.  Following that was a long string of encrypted gibberish set inside PHP brackets.

Uh, okay.  I’ll just add my ads after that and give it a test.  Hmmm….that didn’t work.  I see other ads, though.  Not ones I usually see.  I decided to put the ads above the rest of the text in the file.  Nope, that didn’t work either.  Couldn’t see my ads.  So I made the decision to remove all of the other text and just put my ads in the footer file.  Upon reloading, not only were the ads not visible, but something in the CSS was now broken, and the site looked like garbage.

Putting the text back in made the author’s ads come back, and the CSS was now fine.

Needless to say, that theme is gone.  I don’t mind an author putting links to their site or wherever to get a little credit, but there’s no way your ads are going on my site.  Any ads that appear on RTdN are going to be by choice, and I’m going to have the final say.

It really is a shame, too, because I really liked the theme.  But if I can’t use it in the way I want, I won’t use it at all.

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Comments

2 Responses to ““Forced” Ads That Can’t Be Removed Suck”

  1. Sean Hagen on April 26th, 2008 11:20 pm

    Truly a shame that some people choose to make their work non-GPL compatible ( or at least as far as I understand the GPL ), despite the fact that the whole WordPress project is a big fan of the GPL ( they even ask people to release plugins under the GPL ).

    Happened to me as well for the theme I used for http://pretendingtobejapanese.com, but I just looked at the html that shows up in the browser and pasted that in the footer and it all worked out. I’m guessing that the encrypted gibberish was messed with in another part of the template.

    I’m curious as to what theme it was though, I’d like to take a look to see if I can figure out how they did that ( so that I can figure out a way around it if I run into something similar again in the future ).

  2. Rod on April 28th, 2008 7:08 am

    Indeed it is a shame. The theme was called Holidaez, and you can download it from http://wpthemesfree.com/view.php?theme_id=2627

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