Is it worth designing free styles?
 

Hi,

Recently I started designing vbulletin styles as a means to get to know the software better and also generate backlinks, and also I have moved to a new url and changed my forums domain name, making the creation of links more important now than before.

However, I notice most forum owners remove the links within the footer and so it makes my work a waste of time if they do this. One example is a site that had over 8,000 pages and uses one of my templates as it's main skin, so that is 8,000 links that has been removed (but not until Googlebots indexed the ones that allowed me to see this in webmaster tools).

So, is it worth it?

I am working on a couple of other styles, one designed with Mixed Martial Arts in mind and another based on English Football teams (soccer teams), but if people just remove the links then How do I benefit?:confused:

I would suggest you to sell your themes to fair price. How ever you can't do that in vb.org. i would suggest you to sell your skins to sites like completevb or what ever. If your skin is good, i am sure they will pay a fair price for it :)

If people are removing the links then I would think it's not worth it, but you do say that one objective is to be more familiar with the software, which might out weigh the cost.

Or figure out how to make the theme crash when the link is removed. Not the forum just your theme.

Well, I don't want to charge for them as they are also intended as a means for me to play around with the nuts and bolts of the forum.. And I never removed the links in my footer for the plugins and styles I have used in the past (and present), and as far as I know there is no real way to make a style stop working if the link is removed....

What you could do is to make the link less visible. Like you can use a image link in some place in addition to one in the footer. The image could be some small graphic on the page. So even if the one in the footer is removed the image link will be there.

Ahh, the invisible gif trick! Good thinking.

As an update, I went to the forum that I mentioned earlier. Seems they have also removed the vbulletin copyright info (but keeping their own???) so it is likely they are using a nulled vbulletin so I reported it.

In reply to your thread title..

Yes!

It need not necessarily be a transparent gif... it could be any image which is not noticed much. Dont put it in the footer because people go looking for links to remove there. Put it in some other obscure template.

The trouble at the minute is everybody who makes anything is adding a link to the footer, so you could end up with half a page of links at the bottom of your forum.

Not everybody will remove the links, so you either look at making free skins as a bit of fun and a way to further your knowledge or look at it solely to make backlinks for yourself.

Nothing is ever really simple, it's just about how much you can put up with.