[theme-reviewers] Upselling standards?

[Bryan Hadaway]

Actually, this has less to do with advertising/upselling and more to do
with the new "plugin territory" standard.

As you know for years now, most themes have housed all their features
self-contained more or less, but we're now required to move those changes
to a plugin. So, Responsive now has its own add-on (or what I like to call
companion) plugin for those features that hundreds of thousands of people
have come to rely on that are now removed from the theme:

http://wordpress.org/plugins/responsive-add-ons/

And naturally, trying to avoid breaking people's sites, having an abundance
of support requests open up etc we absolutely emphasize with for example
"It adds notices to the Plugins admin page" and also upon activating we
definitely shout from the mountains "Hey, you probably want this plugin
too!". Other than that, like you noted all other links are appropriate and
relevant.

And for the page of pro themes, this as an entirely aside page that is not
intrusive to the user experience at all. Go to Appearance > Themes Options
with Responsive activated, are you telling me it's really that
obnoxious/difficult to get to and use the options?

For maintaining the most popular free WordPress theme in the history of
WordPress and continuing to provide top notch free support (that includes
writing custom CSS) for the thousands of users that come to us in the
forums, I don't think it's an insane thing that in exchange we get to say
"Hey, if you're interested, we also offer a selection of pro themes."

This is the first time I've ever heard a complaint about this, and it's not
coming from a user, as in just a plain old user. We respect our users and
customers greatly, we have no misleading marketing techniques, we don't
restrict usage, we don't lock people in and we provide amazing support.

If an actual user brought something like this to us in a support request I
would ask them to post the suggestion here:

https://cyberchimps.uservoice.com/

Where the whole community can weigh in on it and if it got enough votes
we'd absolutely improve it.

1. If the actual users (who we care about most) starting complaining about
this we'd definitely improve it. But, it just hasn't happened, period.

2. If the admins weigh in and let us know this isn't allowed we'll of
course fix it immediately.

As much as I respect your opinion to bring matters like this to the list, I
hope you respect my opinion to disagree. I think your concern is more
exaggerated than the issue you're raising itself.

But, I could be wrong. Let me know guys, too many links, are they
intrusive, obnoxious, somehow harmful to users? I'll definitely forward
this issue to development.

Thanks
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