Funny story about someone who illegally downloaded my theme

I’m sure I’m not the only one this has ever happened to, and it probably just means I need to increase my support authentication procedures, but for your amusement…

A little while back someone asked for support for one of my themes. I checked their site, answered many questions, gave them some advice and pointers, and even logged into the admin panel and did some tweaking free of charge, going beyond the scope of my free theme support to do a few small custom CSS changes for them as a courtesy. All in all I had responded to about 20 different support forum threads and responses from this user.

Then, after the 20th or so response, I was out of town for the weekend and wasn’t able to reply to this user’s latest question for about 24 hours (which incidentally was another custom theme modification request). The user proceeded to post a fairly hateful, angry response criticizing my support response times.

My heart wanted to lash out and scold the user for being greedy. But my head said what it always says: “be kind and understanding to each and every user if you want to earn a 5-star ThemeForest profile rating!” So I looked into the user’s latest question, which happened to lead me to a very obvious link in the footer of their site linking to… wait for it… a website where you could illegally download my theme! In fact, it linked directly to the download page, and this user took time and effort to put the link there!

All in all I estimated spending about 2 hours troubleshooting issues for this specific user, who turned out to not have even purchased my theme in the first place. Ugh.

I’m not posting this for sympathy by any means. I’m posting it A ) for your reading amusement, and B ) as a possible example of why it’s a good idea to authenticate user purchases. I know a lot of authors do that (I still don’t) and now I know the reason they do.

Feel free to respond if this has happened to you, or better yet, if you have any good advice on ways to mitigate this.

Happy Tuesday!

Wow, such brutality!

AaaahhHH you such a innocent guy, but not others they want free theme free work Free Money

This is why you always need to verify your buyers, either through the API or via the normal form on your profile.

Shame on such people , sorry for your experience.

LOL , You caught him red-handed.

I really don’t know how they can ask for help if they steal the theme. It’s always a pleasure finding someone that didn’t buy the theme I’m usually really nice to those kind of people .

Steal Vs. Support. It’s funny, they steal the themes but also asks for supports.