Authors, why do you not want URL's in Item Comments?

I’m trying to gather a little feedback around one of the feature requests we get quite often on making URLs in item comments visible to only the item author and the original poster.

Could you tell me why that would be a helpful feature or any suggestions on how you think it should work or look?

Your feedback will help me pass on the best info to our Dev team. Thanks!

Probably because some links reveal the raw content on the client website, content that is not tweaked by the author with code-minimize, photo-watermarks, etc – like in the demo preview.

For items that are purely client side, such as CSS & JS, if someone thinking of purchasing the item reads the comments, they can therefore have a look at the URL and grab the code themselves without paying.

It’s because buyers post links to unobfuscated versions of our work when asking for support. So it kind of defeats the trouble we go through to protect our work when other customers can just grab a fully working version without paying. So we end up flagging the comments, but it’s not a great solution because the buyer had a genuine question that’s now flagged.

^ edit: like what those guys said

CodingJack said
It’s because buyers post links to unobfuscated versions of our work when asking for support. So it kind of defeats the trouble we go through to protect our work when other customers can just grab a fully working version without paying. So we end up flagging the comments, but it’s not a great solution because the buyer had a genuine question that’s now flagged. ^ edit: like what those guys said

Not to mention that buyers post links when something doesn’t work which, more often than not, is caused by a buyer mistake rather than a real bug.

Piracy, piracy.
Don’t know if Envato really cares about that our files are ripped just a couple of hours after published here. All of us publishing open stuff (anything out of cms, both for TF or CC) are expending many hours trying to fight black market obfuscating the code, and trying to make pirates lifes little bit harder. A simple link on file comments makes all this efforts stupid.

How i see it: hide urls for anyone except author. If possible, let the own posted user see his link, if this delays the dev, forget about it.

Hope not to seem rude, but sometimes i think only authors cares about piracy.
Envato should care much about this, is OUR business.

Can’t someone rip a html template directly from the preview url? There’s no difference in someone posting his url and the preview page. Just sayin’

^ Answers:
1) yes
2) BIG difference. Preview is (or should be) obfuscated, minified and encrypted. User url is directly the source code.

pezflash said
^ Answers:
1) yes
2) BIG difference. Preview is (or should be) obfuscated, minified and encrypted. User url is directly the source code.

I was wondered when i found that very popular files like for example SmartStart can be presented in demo without any protection you listed. And they still sells very well.