How on earth can you stop people from making clones of your forums theme if it is custom? Is there a way that you can encrypt the html and css that is being outputted so the cant steal it?
Unfortunately there is no way to stop them, you have to just have the topic/forum reported for stealing and hope that works.
it wont work if he's on a offshore server it will be hard i think.and cxept that if it being on the public for share it would be milions of people who downloaded.
I have an idea about that if you could make a verify system which is forced to be needed and the forum wont run with it i think it would be easy for them to rip it.. Like when you try to register on any site and it requires activate the link from the email smthing like that.
There's no way to stop this. You can't really encrypt the HTML/CSS/Javascript, since the browser needs to be able to understand it to load the page. There are attempts at Javascript solution to this, but they completely kill your site's SEO and usability since... well, guess what happens if you don't have Javascript enabled? No site, so anyone with a screen reader or mobile device can't access it and nor can Google or search bots. And for images, it's basically impossible to stop people stealing them. You can look them up afterwards with a service like tineye to find who has stolen your work, but practically speaking you can't block someone from taking them since you can't disable print screen, you can't stop people disabling javascript and you can't stop people taking your stuff from the browser cache. So nope, there's no way to stop it. You'll just have to deal with it and send DMCA notices and stuff after it's beeen stolen.
It is disappointing how you can't stop things like this, especially , when you spend days making a theme and suddenly it gets stolen by someone who wants to be your rival and wants to take all your hard work and make it look like nothing. It is really upsetting to be honest
You can always complain to their host or send a DMCA notice or something and get the thief's site taken down legally.
Wow, To be fully honest CM30, I had no idea that I could do that. Thank you so very much for letting me know. Now I can do that if it ever so happens to me.
As others said, you can't really prevent it from happening. You have some recourse after they do it, though. You can contact their host and take legal action. You can also make sure you include your website url in the code itself so that even if they steal it and you don't notice immediately, others can see where they got the template. Make sure you watermark your images, too, to further take credit for the work.
I've seen a forum that had a custom theme done and it's being ripped like there is no tomorrow. They are contacting the DMCA, but it's an offshore server.
There isn't really a way to stop them, all you can really do is damage control. Contact the file hosting service that is hosting the file, try to reason with the "rippers" etc; That is the normal route.
