A Movement to Remove Old Themes

Hello ladies and gents,

I’ll cut right down to the chase. I propose a movement to remove a significant amount of old themes (first ones ever uploaded here) that do not adhere to today’s submission standards including aesthetics, browser compatibility, etc.

As per the forums rules, I can’t link to individual items but you can go ahead and visit this link and see for yourself.

In my opinion, it will help clean up the marketplace in a way as well as streamline the overall image of ThemeForest to represent only modern, high-quality, standards-compliant themes.

To be downright frank, some of these themes have only a very few sales since the beginning of time. The odds of additional sales amidst these powerhouses of themes today are zero to none.

Opinions welcome.

Moved to Site Feedback

+1 Thanks for the feedback man, I’m gonna pass this to my bosses.

nothing like some spring cleaning. I say do it!

The downside of this is that if you ever bought one of these themes, they will be gone from the download page, and this is very annoying for me as a buyer.

Acronda said
The downside of this is that if you ever bought one of these themes, they will be gone from the download page, and this is very annoying for me as a buyer.

True. But do you actually own, or have a client still using one of those themes? They barely work on today’s browsers. In any case, your client would demand you to either fix them, or have a new theme installed (i.e. a modern one). We are talking about three years + here.

I say do it.

Acronda said
The downside of this is that if you ever bought one of these themes, they will be gone from the download page, and this is very annoying for me as a buyer.

and this is why this themes should not been deleted.

we need a more powerful search engine not less items

doru said

Acronda said
The downside of this is that if you ever bought one of these themes, they will be gone from the download page, and this is very annoying for me as a buyer.

and this is why this themes should not been deleted.

we need a more powerful search engine not less items

A powerful search-engine has nothing to do with these themes. If I type some keywords that will match one of those 3-year-old themes, they will show up. In fact, if you make the search-engine more powerful, it’s more likely that these old themes appear based on the keywords I type.

Anyhow, of course I am in favor of improving the whole search-engine, but that’s a whole other topic.

crozer said
True. But do you actually own, or have a client still using one of those themes? They barely work on today’s browsers. In any case, your client would demand you to either fix them, or have a new theme installed (i.e. a modern one). We are talking about three years + here.

I wasn’t only refering to older items. Authors do delete more recent items too and then you lose the ability to download them.

I would suggest archiving them, this could include removing them from view and from the listed items but still in the download area for buyers. I look at this as an offsite backup for my bought items.

just as trivia fact, envato already did this type of cleaning on activeden so is nothing new to them.

Acronda said
I would suggest archiving them, this could include removing them from view and from the listed items but still in the download area for buyers. I look at this as an offsite backup for my bought items.

that is not possible for copyright reasons. envato do not own the items here. only the authors, so if an item is deleted, envato can’t keep it in storage and made it available to the buyers because is not they’re item.

Also my personal idea is that the item should be available for download for a reduced amount of time after it was downloaded for the first time, and not for ever available in the download area.