I Didn’t Do It and Neither Did Britney Spears
Here we go again!
I just received email from an annoyed site owner complaining about the comments I posted in his forum using the name of BritneySpears, which is news to me, because until he emailed me I had never seen his forum.
It seems it must be mistaken identity time again but every cloud has a silver lining. I don’t often get the chance to drop a highly searched for, (in?)famous persons name into one of my post titles. :-)
I sometimes get amazed at the seeming ease that I can be accused of all manner of wrong doings because my name is on the bottom of a few WordPress themes.
In this case, I image some fool posted a stupid comment and a spamy link to his website on the forum. When the annoyed site owner visits the site to complain, he can’t find any way of contacting the spammer so he scrolls down to the bottom of the site, that just happens to be using one of my themes for WordPress, and then sees my name in the footer, so he follows the link and finds my contact form!
A similar thing happened a few weeks ago, but that time it was an annoyed nude photographer who’s pictures were being stolen by a site owner who was also using one of my themes.
Sometimes it is really difficult explaining that it has nothing to do with me as they just don’t believe you! Anger often gets the better of them.
Don’t get me wrong. I do realise that it is a hazard of giving themes away and I do sympathise with people who suffer this sort of thing, but I wish that they wouldn’t jump to conclusions so quickly.
This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 11:01 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
March 6th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
It happens everyday now. Every single day. Some days, people throw the “further action” line at me since they think I have used their copyrighted images. Other days, I am told to correct the broken link, or add a link to some site that is “strongly related to your site”. And the site is of course not my own, but a site that uses one of the templates. WP-Andreas09 represents 75% of these situations, for some strange reason. And WordPress.com is probably the most common place for misunderstandings like this, so I would definitely not mind if you would get the keymasters to change the credits to your name! They should correct that anyway…
But as always, I send the people back to my contact page where I clearly explain that they should contact the site owner and not me. If they throw the “further action” line a second time, I just ignore them and wait for an exciting show. So far, I haven’t seen any further action at all.
It comes with the job. And even though it is hard to be polite and friendly to all the aggresive people who make these misunderstandings, it is worth staying calm and make sure they understand. I still haven’t gone public with any of the more serious stories, and I hope that I can avoid it in the future as well…
March 6th, 2007 at 8:22 pm
Word up Ainsley - for whatever it is worth, I certainly back you up on this one as well as your honesty.
Not sure how one could manage this and it would be a shame not to be able to use your work because of a few (I hope few) people’s lack of intelligence.
Not sure a disclaimer on your site could legally help out such situations?!
Reinar
March 6th, 2007 at 8:49 pm
@Andreas, It’s always WP-Andreas09. It seems to attract more than its fair share of porn, spammers and other troublesome sites. I wonder if some of the people who complain to you also complain to me?
Yes I agree it comes with the job and I will have to put up with it.
If ever that “further action” is taken I think they would soon start to look foolish very quickly. My biggest complaint is that they can be so rude and seem to think that I have a responsibility to sort it out, when it is nothing to do with me.
@Reinar, Thanks for your support. I don’t think there is an answer . As you can see from Andreas it is a hazard of the job. No amount of disclaimers will stop people who don’t understand how the web works.
I just spent an hour tracking down a spammers site for the guy that complained. I think in future I will offer to do this for a charge
March 7th, 2007 at 7:13 am
I feel for you. This seems to happen to the best of us. The price of open source, I guess.
Hope your “complainant” had been more open-minded about the situation after you’ve explained it.
March 11th, 2007 at 9:47 am
I’ve seen this happen with the software that Elliot Back wrote. Robert Scoble called him out on it but it was only his software that was used maliciously.