Suggestion to Reduce Noise on Forums

At least once a day, someone posts a new thread about the infamous “missing stylesheet” problem (362 results). My suggestion is that you add a regular expression match on the new thread title field that matches /(missing)?.*style(sheet|\.css)?/. If it matches, forward the user to the knowledge base page for WordPress theme problems before allowing them to create a new thread.

How about including a one sentence instruction in download section explaining that you must unpack the archive first and see what to upload to WP?

Just add a completely separate download link to get the theme itself and make it more prominent than the full package download. WordPress users expect to download a ZIP file that they simply upload via the WordPress admin. This is a community standard and ThemeForest doesn’t follow this.

There shouldn’t be a need for a FAQ or crazy regular expressions on the forum posting form. Just do it like everyone else in the WordPress community.

I’ve had more users over the past 6 months from ThemeForest come to me with the “missing stylesheet” question than I’ve had over the past 7 years of making WordPress themes.

greenshady said
Just add a completely separate download link to get the theme itself and make it more prominent than the full package download. WordPress users expect to download a ZIP file that they simply upload via the WordPress admin.

This might work, but buyers should be encouraged to download everything, just in case the file is removed later. Imagine downloading just the theme zip only to return in a month to find that the docs and PSD zip has been removed.

greenshady said
I’ve had more users over the past 6 months from ThemeForest come to me with the “missing stylesheet” question than I’ve had over the past 7 years of making WordPress themes.

That kind of makes it sound like it’s a lot. But I assume that number is 5 at most, unless your theme was very popular with first time customers on Themeforest.

I think it was more popular with authors who want to learn from the code than regular customers. That’s why I bought it

themebros said

greenshady said
I’ve had more users over the past 6 months from ThemeForest come to me with the “missing stylesheet” question than I’ve had over the past 7 years of making WordPress themes.

That kind of makes it sound like it’s a lot. But I assume that number is 5 at most, unless your theme was very popular with first time customers on Themeforest.

Considering that my themes have seen millions of downloads over the years, 5 would be a lot in comparison when looking at the small number of downloads of my theme here. The point is that users should have the theme in the format that they expect. Five users who can’t figure out how to install the theme is 5 users too many.

The exact number is actually 9 (number of emails I have about this issue). So, 92 downloads with 9 people who can’t figure out how to install the theme versus millions of downloads with fewer than 5 people who can’t figure it out.

greenshady said

themebros said

greenshady said
I’ve had more users over the past 6 months from ThemeForest come to me with the “missing stylesheet” question than I’ve had over the past 7 years of making WordPress themes.

That kind of makes it sound like it’s a lot. But I assume that number is 5 at most, unless your theme was very popular with first time customers on Themeforest.

Considering that my themes have seen millions of downloads over the years, 5 would be a lot in comparison when looking at the small number of downloads of my theme here. The point is that users should have the theme in the format that they expect. Five users who can’t figure out how to install the theme is 5 users too many.

The exact number is actually 9 (number of emails I have about this issue). So, 92 downloads with 9 people who can’t figure out how to install the theme versus millions of downloads with fewer than 5 people who can’t figure it out.

greenshady said

themebros said

greenshady said
I’ve had more users over the past 6 months from ThemeForest come to me with the “missing stylesheet” question than I’ve had over the past 7 years of making WordPress themes.

That kind of makes it sound like it’s a lot. But I assume that number is 5 at most, unless your theme was very popular with first time customers on Themeforest.

The exact number is actually 9 (number of emails I have about this issue). So, 92 downloads with 9 people who can’t figure out how to install the theme versus millions of downloads with fewer than 5 people who can’t figure it out.

10% is quite a big number. In our case it’s about 1% (less than 50 out of 4800 customers) and 0% on this account (0 out of 128 customers).

But i am not disagreeing with you, on the contrary, i completely agree, there should be a separate download link for just the theme. One button can say “Download Package” and the other “Download Theme”.

For a while now there is a specific field for just the theme zip, so i believe adding the additional button would be quite easy.

But we kind of made peace with the fact that our suggestions are heard but not quite accepted.