Thanks to Jenny of PJMommy.com for bringing this to my attention.

Someone took my Dream On theme, stripped the footer message, and replaced it with a sponsored link to a web-hosting review website.

Here’s the stolen version:

Here are the stolen version’s theme page on the WordPress Theme Viewer and test-run link.

It’s been only seven days after my GPL announcement. Not all WPDesigner themes have been re-released under GPL yet and someone already stole one of my themes. This is the kind of thing GPL theme designers have to deal with.

On one hand, I should go after this person to tell everyone it’s not okay to do such a thing. On the other hand, the theme viewer’s manager already has enough trouble on his hands. Bothering him about this on a case to case basis isn’t going to help.

Like I’ve been saying, the theme viewer needs to change into a manually filtered database and it needs a moderation area to review new themes before publishing.

I’m not writing this post to say, “FOUL!” This is simply for exposing the people manipulating the theme viewer, their techniques, and loop-holes.