[wp-hackers] Premium plugin protection

[Chip Bennett]

And they're on to that tactic now, too. A lot of these bastards are now
putting in checksums and other code-checks in header.php (and functions.php,
and elsewhere) to check for changes to the encrypted footer.php code - and
die() if it's been changed.

(Not that such checks are anything more than an annoyance, since they, too,
can be cleaned up and removed.)

Chip

On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 10:00 PM, Ryan Bilesky <rbilesky at gmail.com> wrote:

> I agree I have ran into themes that do that with the footer, in an effort
> to
> force you to keep their links, so when they do that I will rebuild the
> footer html myself then remove their links just to spite them lol, but hey
> its GPL I can do that.  Whereas if they would have left the footer as just
> plain code, I would have either just kept the links or make a donation to
> the developer before removing if I really didn't want the links but liked
> the template.
>
> On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 7:40 PM, Otto <otto at ottodestruct.com> wrote:
>
> > Just a data point to consider.
> >
> > Obfuscating your source code makes other developers hate you, badmouth
> > you, and send as much negative press your way as possible. Why?
> > Because you have made them look bad.
> >
> > Friend of mine called me up a few months ago. Said her boss was having
> > problems with a WordPress installation (big local blog). I wandered
> > down to their offices, met with them, found out what the problem was,
> > sat down at her desk... and got totally screwed over because the (paid
> > for) theme used frickin' encryption on the functions.php file. All
> > they wanted was some relatively minor changes, but because of the
> > encryption (good hard stuff too, not easy to decode), there was
> > basically nothing I could do. I had to make my apologies as best I
> > could. Then I immediately got on Twitter and badmouthed the hell out
> > of the theme creators.
> >
> > Consider your users and what's best for them. What's *really* best for
> > them is not having to come to you for every single little problem. If
> > they can learn something and solve issues themselves, then you should
> > let them do so. What are you selling here, after all? Lock in?
> >
> > People who obfuscate or otherwise make their code hard for their users
> > to use are scum. Period.
> >
> > -Otto
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> >
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