Just my .02

Placing a copyright link on a mod where the majority of the page is generated by that mod is fine IMO. Placing your link (1 link) in the footer of a photo gallery or classified section mod, seems appropriate to me.

However, I don't think copyright links should be placed on pages not substantially generated by that mod. I think it disrespects the work of other mod authors. I also don't think its appropriate to place the link when your mod didn't substantially change the look / function of the page.

If everyone placed a site wide footer link, my footer would be a laundry list.

I think it's not ethical and it's obvious that they do it to increase their seo rank and to get some additional visibility however, I don't have a problem with this and I think it's legal and up to them.
On the side note I don't like their mods mostly because of the low code quality. They are doing everything with only money in mind. They are UK based company that based their business on fulfilling the vbulletin mods niche by using cheap outsourced coders from third world countries.

Eh?

All of our coders are either US or UK based. I'm not sure where you live that the UK and US are third world countries, but tell me so I can move there immediately!

Iain

Naturally in this instance it would be prudent for DBTech to grant Christos the use of his disabling code (so allowing his mod pages NOT to show the DBTech copyright) to his installed version of DBTechs' Copyright Manager.

@DBTech, why not just build in an option in settings to add custom pages..etc to be exempt, you can always double check to see if the user is trying to exempt the copyright from standard vb pages, shouldn't be too hard and then everyone will be happy :)

Checking 10,000+ sites would be kinda tricky! xD

We'll look into ways to try to make the mods more selective and only affect vB pages where possible, but no promises :)

If it comes down to it we'll kinda have to take the "big evil business" approach and put our own needs ahead of the wants of the coders who would rather the copyright wasn't on their generated pages.

If it's possible to change it up without it being a major operation that will cost us time/money I'll try to take that route, though :)

Iain

This would require an end user to add the exempt pages to their DBTech install. Without the end user doing that, the copyright would still appear on other mod's pages.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate what DBTech is trying to do. That's clean up the footer of all the individual copyrights.

The absolutely easiest way is to check if the script is a standard vB script or a full DBTech script and exclude the copyright from all pages generated by scripts that aren't in that list. Just put all the script names in an array and check if THIS_SCRIPT is in that array or not.

--------------- Added [DATE]1370636222[/DATE] at [TIME]1370636222[/TIME] ---------------

As a totally, completely off topic comment to DBTech...

You might want to switch to curl for what you're doing. allow_url_fopen is a system level only setting and can't be changed with ini_set by a script.

We're discussing it, and the biggest issue with that is it means making a huge list that has to be updated every time we release a new mod (which is roughly every few weeks). Then we would have to edit/re-upload all of our mods using global footers. Every few weeks.

Plus we would need to ask users to come download and install those updates every few weeks.

We would be significantly inconveniencing ourselves and our users/customers to pull this off, in other words.

There's also the argument to be made that many of our mods DO run on pages generated by other mods, some visibly and some in the background, and by taking this approach we would be removing copyright giving users actual correct info.

For instance our Navtabs mod would run on any page with a navbar. Our profile hover mod on any page with linked usernames, etc. There are many other examples, too. By blanket excluding all non-default pages, we would be removing the copyright of those mods despite them potentially being on that page.

Iain

That's what I deducted after speaking with you on your site a while ago but I might be wrong. I cannot know that for sure and I cannot know the percentage of such code there, bugged and poor code can be written by really anyone. It just happens today that most of such code pieces come from India, Pakistan etc and it also doesn't mean there are no any good coders there, it's just ...there are dozens of "coders" there or guys who try to be "coders" and most of them is low quality ones. But speaking of the code, it's really poor and not extensible. Also whenever I asked you if something could be implemented you said it either can't be done or that you will check with your coder and nothing after then ever happened.

Iain,

If the navtabs were installed on my test server, I'd have no problem with the navtab copyright appearing on my mods pages. But in the example I gave, neither the post thanks or slider mods are present on that page.

The general disagreement is mainly caused by the global copyright managment mod you recently released. And would be the most difficult to manage.

Other mods, individually it's simple to restrict where the copyright is seen. Forgive any mistakes below..

For example

The slider would on on the forumhome and I believe the CMS page.
Post thanks on showthread and showpost (plus any other places it's used)
Navtabs - yes.. everywhere that navtabs can be displayed.

Can you PM me some examples of that happening? Often feature requests will be marked as "under consideration" and then a decision will be made on them when the mod is being updated. We can't add every request to every mod, especially if it's very specific to one persons site, or will be a large amount of work that very few people are asking for/will use :)

There aren't dozens of coders at DBTech - at the moment there are 6. There have never been more than about 8 at once, and every one of them without exception has been from the UK (or ireland) or the US. Absolutely 0% of our code is outsourced, it is all done in-house by one of those coders.

Iain