[theme-reviewers] Lite Themes

Thu Oct 2 08:39:47 UTC 2014

Emil, actually, when I first read your email this morning I really couldn’t believe it. I thought I still am dreaming and it’s only a nightmare. :-)

But I thought let’s see what the reactions are on this because I thought maybe I just don’t get it and it’s a misunderstanding. But now that I read that Thomas has the same thoughts, I’ll also want to give my 2 cents.

Are you sure that no longer police theme names at all is a good approach for the theme directory? Because I’m not sure on this and there is a pretty good change that this becomes quite a spammy battle. In the end a lot of us are running a business and we all have to pay our bills. Developers on WordPress.org provide free themes for users, many of those free themes have even premium character and did cost countless hours of development time. But we’re still have to pay our bills and it doesn’t mean that everything is for free. So there must be a fair way to monetize our efforts. 

In the end there is also competition, but as on the free market, there have to be some rules to keep it a fair game. I’m also not a fan of policing everything and the rules and guidelines on .org are getting quite heavy…sometimes it’s a bit too much in my opinion (no offense). But when it comes to naming policy, there suddenly seem to be no rules at all, which I actually don’t understand. Especially not because it’s a very important thing to protect your brand and products. I’m fine with not policing names at all, as long as there are no collisions that have the goal to harm developers. We’ve seen a lot of rip offs recently from developers who are just copying themes to have a few minutes of fame (until their themes get removed…) and there is a pretty good chance that we are getting similar issues with names, especially when successful themes are getting ripped by those guys who have no creativity and honor at all.

For example if a developer chooses a generic name, he must be aware that also other people could us it. For example if he chooses „Apple“ then I think it’s fine when someone else uses „Apple sweet“, „Apple blue“, Apple green“, etc… That's the disadvantage of a generic name and you can’t really protect it. Developers must be aware that choosing generic names might not be a good idea, especially when it comes to issues regarding naming policies. A generic word usually can’t be a brand. Ok, I see, my example with Apple was a bit stupid! :-D But I think you get what I mean.

But I think it’s something else when a brand is involved. For example Thomas has a theme called „zeeDynamic“ as „ThemeZee“ is his brand. I don’t think it should be allowed to upload a theme „zeeDynamic better“ for example. This just would be ridiculous. It’s the same with other brands. If your brand is „AB“, and you release a theme „AB Wonderful“, than it should not be allowed to release „AB Wonderful with stars and strips“ or similar. Just „Wonderful“ would be fine in my opinion (if „Wonderful“ itself isn’t related to the developer / theme shop), but developers should not be allowed to use the brand of other people to push their own stuff.

Imagine you release a theme called „Emil News“ which is very successful and then someone else releases a theme called „Emil News Theme“. Wouldn’t you want to have a serious conversation with this guy? His name is probably not „Emil“, but just „Idiot“. He uses your name to push his theme, this shouldn’t be allowed, at least when it comes to names of theme shops or brands. 

As you see, this is much more complicated than just saying „names are not policed at all“ and we might want to discuss this further as this is unacceptable from a business point of view.

Kind regards,
Michael

Am 02.10.2014 um 10:03 schrieb Thomas from ThemeZee <contact at themezee.com>:

> Well, it was perfectly fine for theme developers to name their themes with "Lite" or "Pro", because nobody could take the name with the old guidelines.
> Now names are no longer policed, but a lot of developers have named all their free themes "Theme Name Lite" and it will be confusing to change that for existing users.
> 
> And what is about the other way around? Some developer releases "Theme Name" and after that another developer comes up with "Theme Name Lite". Allowed or not? It has basically the same result that there are two different themes with nearly the same name. When names are no longer policed in any way we will soon have a lot of different themes with similiar names.
> 
> And my final question: Can I release a dummy theme "Theme Name" in addition to "Theme Name Lite", which I'll unapprove right away? Basically can I block theme names? Since names are no longer policed it seems the only way to prevent the case you have mentioned.
> 
> 2014-10-02 3:56 GMT+02:00 Sakin Shrestha <info at sakinshrestha.com>:
> Yes, really hard to understand it. This type of naming will simply undesirable. Especially lite, pro of already approved theme. Can we discuss about this in coming theme review meeting and have a fixed review rule for names.
> 
> 
> On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 7:37 AM, Srikanth Koneru <tskk79 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hard to keep up with TRT policies, so if someone submits destro pro/lite/uno/prime/donkey, it will be allowed since names are not policed ?
> 
> On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 7:14 AM, Edward Caissie <edward.caissie at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 8:10 PM, Emil Uzelac <emil at uzelac.me> wrote:
> If you submit a theme called "Theme Name Lite" you are leaving the door open for anyone else to submit a different theme under "Theme Name" only. 
> 
> This is true of any theme name using more than one "word" ... see my example of "Opus Primus" and someone submitting "Opus" months later.
> 
> 
> Edward Caissie
> aka Cais.
> 
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