[wp-forums] We are not the theme police

Fri Aug 23 15:58:33 UTC 2013

As a relative new-comer to the forums list, I want to pipe in the say that
I'm finding this a very valuable discussion to hear.

I agree with the official stance on non-support for commercial themes, for
all the very good reasons listed. But I have also run into mostly-pure-css
questions which I could have answered (or did answer) to some degree of
helpfulness without being able to see the theme itself.

And in some cases -- given the longer-term moderators' dedication to the
commercial non-support stance that I'd seen across the boards -- I felt
that answering the question at all might be undermining board policies
which I agree with fundamentally in theory, thought they're not always
necessary or most helpful to enforce in practice.

I'm glad to see a spectrum of options here, at least so I know I'm not
going renegade on you guys :)

-denise

-- 
@lettergrade
www.lettergrade.ca

On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 8:00 AM, <wp-forums-request at lists.automattic.com>wrote:

>
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2013 19:13:55 -0500
> From: Chris Olbekson <chris at c3mdigital.com>
> To: "For forum moderators. See also
>         http://make.wordpress.org/support/" <
> wp-forums at lists.automattic.com>
> Subject: Re: [wp-forums] We are not the theme police
> Message-ID: <6ED2371F-FD33-4EBA-B8FA-01DD47EC15B6 at c3mdigital.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
>
> The reason I brought this up is because we as moderators should not be
> making judgements on how or where someone acquired a theme or plugin.  I
> didn't link to the specific topic or even mention who respond ed because I
> was speaking generally not specific.  When you say "We do not support
> stolen themes" you are telling someone they are using a "stolen" theme.
>  You may not be directly accusing them of "stealing" it but you are
> implying that they are doing something wrong.
>
> The reason I mentioned the GPL is because when using GPL software there is
> no such thing as stolen or theft because the author of the code has given
> everyone and anybody permission to do what ever they want with that code
> (except re distribute it under a different license).  Now whether the theme
> in question is GPL or not doesn't matter because again it is not our place
> to even find out if it is.
>
> And in my opinion the question was not theme specific.  The user wanted to
> know how to make their site responsive and the answer could have been
> "Remove the fixed width from the content tag and change to a percentage".
>  Now if the user came back and said "How do I change the css, I looked in
> the style.css file and there is nothing there"  Now the question becomes
> theme specific and we can politely tell them they need to get support from
> the developer via the themes support system at www.premiumthemesupport.com
> .
>
> There is no need to say we don't support stolen themes and tell them they
> need to legitimately purchase it. We don't know how they acquired it nor
> should it matter.
>
> The only reason I bring this up to the list is because I care about our
> forum users experience and feel very strong about treating anyone that
> comes to the forums for help with respect and dignity.
>
> my .02 thanks for reading.
>
> Chris
>
>
>
>
> > ?  The question was really a CSS question and could have applied to ANY
> theme or website
> >
> > No. CSS questions are theme and site specific. If we actually want to
> provide some useful information then we need to be supporting the user's
> particular theme. As Mika mentioned, you can provide all the
> non-site-specific CSS you want but eventually the user will need to
> implement it into their theme and then you can run into troubles with the
> theme doing things weirdly. I've offered plenty of CSS support for
> WooThemes, for example, and people just cannot implement the CSS because
> WooThemes handles CSS specially.
> >
> >
> >
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2013 07:45:39 +0200
> From: Borko Livic <borkolivic at gmail.com>
> To: "For forum moderators. See also
>         http://make.wordpress.org/support/" <
> wp-forums at lists.automattic.com>
> Subject: Re: [wp-forums] We are not the theme police
> Message-ID:
>         <
> CAD0N7+ANZ4O67XKxibWdiSyzzBGMVUyMmHSJntNf5eNCTbnArw at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> I understand that only WPORG themes are supported on the forum (and i agree
> with the policy). I just wanted to point out that it happened (quite a few
> times) that a user asked a CSS related question and a mod forwarded him to
> the theme author. After that, i really don't want to step on mod's toes and
> answer anyway, even though the question wasn't theme related (for
> example,how to change the bg color of an element). I always encourage
> people to inspect elements (or use Firebug) but we all know there will
> always be a bunch of people that won't (or can't) handle such tasks,no
> matter how simple it seems to us.
>
> Regards,
>
> Media X
>
>