WordPress themes, and assumed responsibility

I’ve had a number of emails recently about an Islamic website that is using my free WordPress theme – Regulus. People have been emailing assuming that, because I designed the theme, I am a terrorist.

I can’t actually comment on the website as none of the emails (or blog comments!) have actually explained anything – the authors jumping straight into threats and accusations, but the fact that they have found me because of the theme and automatically accuse me without checking their facts surprises and upsets me.

This is not the first time I have been emailed about websites that use my theme, previously I have had people contact me because they want to get in touch with someone using my theme who doesn’t have a contact page. Generally a short response explaining the situation is enough, but I don’t like the idea that people are jumping to these conclusions.

For the time being I am going to change the theme so that the credit in the footer says something like “theme downloaded for free from Binary Moon” but this won’t solve the problem for all the old blogs using my theme. This seems to be a case of 1% of the people, the vocal minority, ruining things for the other 99% (or 0.01% for 99.99%?).

In a perfect world there would be no terrorism, or racial/ religious hatred but we don’t live in a perfect world. I don’t want to stop creating themes but things like this put me off.

Whilst writing this post I received an email letting me know that the website in question was featured on Fox news in the US.

Let me know what you think on Mastodon, or BlueSky (or Twitter X if you must).

WordPress News

The latest WordPress updates from the WPBriefs Podcast.

Related Posts

29 Mar 2009

The future of WordPress themes

A couple of weeks ago there was quite a lot of talk within the WordPress themes community about the future of WordPress. Ian Stewart started it, and then it spread around the blogosphere… so I thought I’d offer my rather...
05 Sep 2016

MasterWP – A Free Course to Improve Your WordPress Skills

As a premium theme seller my target audience is implementors, people who buy themes for clients and then customize them. But how do people get to be implementors to start with? This is something I wanted to tackle – helping...
13 May 2010

6 Tips to Build Better WordPress Themes

If you want to make WordPress themes, for clients, to release for free or to sell, then there are a lot of factors you need to take into consideration. Below are some hints and tips that should help ease your...
01 Apr 2015

The State of WordPress Themes #wcldn

I recently spoke on a panel at WordCamp London 2015e. Lance – who used to be the Theme Team lead at WordPress.com – asked me if I wanted to speak on a panel with him at WordCamp London 2015. I’ve...
17 Aug 2018

Mythic WordPress Starter Theme, and Thinking About All Developers

Mythic is a new starter theme by Justin Tadlock (with help from his friends/ collaborators). The project is designed to introduce a fully modern theme development process.It follows best practices for coding, and makes use of things like npm (or...
26 May 2011

Choosing What to Add to a Premium Theme

Building WordPress themes for Pro Theme Design I have to tread a fine line, between what people ask for, and what people want.I get loads of feature requests, and generally my approach is to suggest a plugin, or to dig...