I think some guy or gal stumbled into my post, Free Thesis Download – Beware while searching for a free download link and boasted that he/she has downloaded a fine working copy. He/she further suspected that I have artificially created those malicious codes to scare people away from downloading illegal copies of the Thesis Theme. While I do admit that the post’s purpose is indeed to deter people from getting themselves into unneccassay trouble, I certainly do not have the imagination to come up with those cryptic codes. Those are for real and it takes someone with a high level of programming knowledge to create one. I do not have that knowledge.
Obviously, the commenter have never seen such codes or have no idea where those codes could be hidden, thus I thought it would be a good idea to let you guys see for yourself the real thing. Go to this site:
www.wpthemespress dot com
The first impression you get is this is such a wonderful site. All the themes there are premium themes that are absolutely beautiful compared to those you get in the official WordPress Theme site. The download counter shows hundreds and thousands of downloads for many of the Themes. They are after all very good and nice themes and you get them all for free without paying anything.
Download any theme you fancy and install it. Some advanced themes might need you to install additional plugins before they can function, however, it all works beautifully without any hitch. You might see an additional footer link or two, but in many cases, people do not mind because it is such a wonderful Theme to have for free.
Now go to your Theme editor, first open up the footer php. then if you do not see anything, open up the functions php. You WILL see how encyrpted codes looks like in any one of these 2 locations. If you are adventurous enought you mght want to investigate further, but I think I have seen enough.
Quite frankly, I have no problem with sponsored Themes though I refrain from using them to prevent unnecessary link juice leakage. It is a way of making money for Theme designers and it is also a good way for webmasters who sponsored it to get lots of links cheaply if the Theme proved to be popular. It is the encrypted part that makes me very uneasy because I have no way of deciphering those codes. It might show one or two perfectly good sites in your footer, but who is to say for sure that there might be another 2 invisible ones that points to some illegal sites. That would be a risk that I do not want to take.
You are much better to join together with many others, all chip in a couple bucks, and buy a legal copy of the actual theme. That way, no malicious code!