Do you think your first buyer...

rayoflightt said
I don’t know for wordpress but html templates are stolen in few hours after they appear on marketplace, there is no need to be bought, they are stolen from preview. Only thing you can do is to minify css and js in preview, remove comments and that way make code harder to understand and change. My first template approved here didn’t have sales for first 10 days but I was finding it all over internet. I thought nobody will ever buy anything that way. But there is still people who buy themes legally.

Still, I really appreciate some buyers who give a lot of cooperation to me (even helped me to improve my theme )

The funniest thing that happened on one html site template is that i had the olark live chat code installed on the preview. This live chat thingy shows you which page the user currently view including the IP and the path of the page.

So i could see who was using a stolen copy because the path is like C:\Themes\Theme_name\index.html and of course i was initiating a chat with them like “alright then, just remove the live chat code at least” hah. Funny and provides some insights about the number of people who have downloaded the template

People rip preview of html themes and they have bots that automatically harvest new TF items. That is why you will find rips in hours of release, even for files without purchase.

That is why I recommend you twist the preview code to a degree to make it useless to try to use it to make a website from it and add a link to where they can buy it as a comment in every page. You can put up a sample of the html code and css code in the screenshots section.

I encourage others to share my work. It’s one of the major reasons I’ve had such a successful WordPress theme/plugin business since 2008.

I even asked Envato if they’d allow me to upload a 100% GPL -licensed theme here so that the design portion of my theme could be distributed by those who purchase it. Envato said it’s not allowed though.

So, why do some people put so much effort into sharing premium themes for free? The only reasonable explanation is, they have put any malicious code into it. And that is really risky. So I would NEVER download a theme from an untrusted source.

dnp_theme said
I also get support requests out of nowhere, no purchase. Ignore them, make them feel the cold winter

Agreed with u