My previous sponsored theme post followed by Matt’s support has generated a lot of buzz in the WordPress and blogging communities. Weblogtoolscollection.com readers’ opinion and the WordPress community’s opinion on this move are mostly positive and I appreciate your understanding and support. The sponsored theme community however, has been overwhelmingly negative and their dialog has degenerated into name calling and nastiness directed towards Matt and myself. Unlike Matt, some of the people that have berated me, called me names and disparaged my work, are people that I respect, who were in touch with me frequently and on whom I have spent a lot of time and effort on promotion in the past (and for the record, will continue to promote in the future). The negative responses were not fun to read through but the positives were also very heartening and encouraging.

Let me say that it is very hard for me to turn the other cheek but that is what I choose to do and I will not add fuel to the fire.

I will however, try to address a few of the legitimate concerns that I have read in the past few days. We will try to make every effort to check themes and links to make sure that they are not violating copyrights or infringing on another designer’s rights. We will make sure that themes are of higher quality and of greater value to our readers. This will reduce the quantity of themes and will probably reduce the number of theme posts but I think my readers will find more value in better quality themes from our news posts. Also, I acknowledge that it is almost impossible to know every theme that has been posted in the past and recognize every copyright violator. Mistakes can and will happen. I would like to request that theme authors report copyright violations and other errors as soon as possible either through the comments or via the contact form on the top menu. We will make every effort to correct these issues as quickly as possible.

I have also known that this move might hurt those sponsored theme designers who release high quality themes with minimal sponsorship and provide the ability for their users to remove the sponsored links[1]. These theme designers and promoters have made legitimate points in their discussion of this problem and have echoed my own private concerns. However, such designers are scarce and there is no effective, fair and consistent way of making exceptions to allow certain sponsors and certain designers without playing favorites, without hurting those that are not within the exceptions and without hurting the users of these theme. I personally feel that arbitrating sponsored themes into sponsored “allowed” and sponsored “disallowed” will cause more confusion and more friction in the community because any limits set by an individual or a group will only be challenged on one ground or the other. It will also result in copycats creating even more themes with “minimal sponsorship” to keep within the boundaries with very little differences between versions.

I would also like to clarify one of the notions that has been circulating around this discussion. I have no problem with designer credits as long as they are within boundaries. Designer credits at the footer of a theme are fine by me. But if you as a designer are linking back to your blog many times[2] from within a single theme, you will be asked to tone it down.

To re-iterate, if you feel that there is any error in a particular post of ours, or you feel that there is a copyright issue, please contact us and we will take the necessary steps as soon as possible.

[1] This was in the original post but was edited out by me because I could not find the right words and context. In hindsight, it probably should have been left there.

[2] This has been taken to an extreme and needs to be addressed.

PS: For the record, my last name is Ghosh.