Good day today, had an email contact come through from our submit news section, somebody out there likes us! It was from a WordPress theme developer called Padd Solutions. Announcing a new FREE WordPress theme. So without delay I immediately downloaded the theme. A big mistake.
As I mentioned the email came directly from the email contact form here on WPin.me, so got all excited (as you do) and read the email entitled ‘Thoriumific Free WordPress Theme’. So off I trot to download this self proclaimed ‘highly customizable magazine WordPress theme’.
Installed it as you do, and remembering the lessons learnt from my other post on Free WordPress themes I decided to run it through the WordPress TAC (Theme Authenticity Check) plugin is available here to use on WordPress.org
The theme authenticity checker gave me the following read out which stated that the theme was OK! So I went through the process and activated it, as you do.
Awesome free WordPress theme, could use it for future projects or my own blogs etc! Yay, clap of hands lets dig in to it then shall we? Well I did dig in upon activating the actual theme itself as I scanned through I noticed the following in the WordPress footer:
Ok, in fairness that link was in the footer of the demo as well. I will just remove it with in the back end options. No probs.
A quick scan through the options for the Thoriumific WordPress theme was fruitless, no where does it give you the option of changing or deleting the link. So with that in mind I decided to dig into the guts of the theme and found in footer.php the following statement:
<?php padd_theme_credits(); ?>
Ah, this is too easy I shall just remove this reference from the footer or type over it with my own etc. Tried that. #fail
Well it does appear that I could not make any changes, as upon viewing the home page I was greeted with the above. Nice. So basically despite checking with the TAC plugin (no fault of that by the way it’s still an awesome plugin) it would appear they have found a way to bypass the checks it makes. Hmmmmm.
I know, I know what do you expect the theme is free etc. Yes it is free that’s quite correct but as I know a little about this type of thing and I know to be wary. However others may just see free WordPress theme and jump on it like it was the last life boat on the Titanic.
Therein lies the danger, the unsuspecting, unassuming, these are the types of individuals who will be unwittingly housing back links to affiliate sites and worse. Do they really want that? Does anyone?
Well benefit of the doubt I decided to go through some more themes, not to give them enough rope so to speak, but really to find out how deep the rabbit hole goes.
So tested a few more themes dating back to October 2008 and had some interesting results:
Actiniumize 1.0 by Padd Solutions - 
Bismuthic 1.0 by Padd Solutions
Franciumous 1.0 by Padd Solutions
In fairness I tested 6 of their supposed FREE WordPress themes and every single time I ended up with harmful back links on my site, footer links are often overlooked and anyone looking for a free WordPress theme should use due diligence in doing so. Either get them from WordPress.org or do your research, Google the theme to see if anyone else has anything to say about the theme in question.
worth noting the six themes I downloaded and installed all checked out OK with the WordPress TAC
Me I got rather bored of going through Padd Solutions themes, only to be reminded time after time that they obviously are in it for the money with affiliate links in the footer and ads all over their own website, from text link ads etc.
My advice is to steer WELL CLEAR from anything Padd Solutions offers in terms of free WordPress themes. If you have a Padd Solutions WordPress theme then check your footer for dodgy back links.
Sure there is probably work arounds to remove the footer links in any of the themes that Padd Solutions offers, but do you really want to do that? If you manage to remove the link what other code may exist within the theme itself that could potentially harm you from an SEO point of view or worse still provide a back door into your WordPress install.
I would take it as every single WordPress theme Padd Solutions has offered has some kind of back link the footer of sorts, I can’t prove it without downloading and installing every single WordPress theme they have release but alarmingly:
If the above is true, thats 915,000 harmful back links to nefarious websites being housed by those unwittingly or knowingly, either way I would hazard a guess most people would argue what harm would it really do to link back to something completely unrelated to me.
Whatever people decide or have decided on, this practice above all else is deceitful and to be quite honest with you quite disgusting. But now I know, so do you.
To be forewarned and all that….
