Hey... I have a site. EGOnline.. well I signed up for hosting at Distanthost.com.. and submit my site in the website critiques forum for review... got a couple reponses and such. then one guy posts that if thats phpnuke and phpbb i don't have copyrights and such. I havn't touched them I said. and he says that they aren't there and I should add them back in..

my question is.. (running ClanMtC theme by mtechnik) do I have to add the copyright lines back into the preferences from adim panel. or is it ok to keep it the way it is?

http://www.egonline.distanthost.com/html/

Without being an expert in it, my take is that people should ALWAYS leave copyrights lines alone or quote the appropriate source for printed materials. Without that, the progress stops. Someone takes credit for others work and no one else can reach the source again. It is a broken link that can suffocate any field. The cardinal rule in intellectual property is that everyone should acknowledge the source, or if using a web product (themes, etc...) leave the attached copyrights. If there were modifications of any sort, the original copyrights lines should remain.
In the scientific field, this is not a big problem, because our peers already know who did what, when, etc... Failing to mention the proper credits is termed "plagiarism", the paper is tossed and the author sort of disgraced.
In the computer world, this is not evident. Newbies who see a nice theme without the copyrights lines do not know who is the original author. The link is already broken and no one can get to the source.


My one cent.
dcasmr

Speaking of.
Admins of this site need to read that a few times and look at this site. Descide for themself clearly what they stand for.

We have already been made aware of that site.
We DID NOT develop the ORGIGNAL Digital Dimentia template.
You can see in the footer who did. Mighty tried to contact the original Author for permissions to port the template etc. but was unsuccessful.

We are VERY aware of copyrights, believe me. If you have been around this site long enough, you would know that.
We get permssions from every template author to port their template and then make a matching Nuke theme for them. This has been our policy since the beginning.

If you would like to discuss this further, please feel free to PM me, but we definately don't need to get a flame war started here.

Everyone needs to make sure they are aware of how copyrights ACTUALLY work.

Do's and Don't's of Copyrights
http://www.snowcrest.net/kitty/hpages/dos.html
US Copyright Office
http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/
10 Copyright Myths
http://www.templetons.com/brad//copymyths.html

mikem

so does that mean i have to put the copyright messages back in the footer lines in admin/preferences... (if so thats fine / i don't care to. i just though b/c they were in preferences i could change them if i wanted)

hmm after reading all the post, still not sure if i did anything wrong lol clanmts pulls default footer message from the nuke just like most themes does. i didnt take out any copyrights what so ever. pulling the footer message from nukes core i figure the copyrights should be there. 8O

ok... so for the copyrights to appear do they have to be in the footer lines from preferences? b/c those are the only ones ive deleted.. i havn't touched anyother code

and if the copyrights have to stay. then why have an option in preferences to change/delete them?

The lines in preferences don't have to stay but this line is hardcoded and should be there
search in theme.php if this line exists
and in footer.html if this one exists

ok... where in those files should those two lines be located?

EDIT - those are not in the files you specified. i tried just changing the $footer_message to = footmsg() .. but the message that is hardcoded into nuke appeard right below my news stories on the front page. instead of at the very bottom of the page.

I'll download the ClanMTS thempack and then i'll fix and report it to Mtechnik