Does the new Surfing Co design look very similar to this older Economics design?

This one also looks a little too much like this other one.

Indeed, he's just releasing freecsstemplates.org's templates with different images. Check.. All of his templates are like that.

This is enough. For a few templates, maybe they are getting by. But I think the community has had it with these idiots. If they want to release it on their site then they can go be retards, but it's time that they are either banned completely and or their designs removed.

And this added to "Site Rules & Design Submission Guidelines"
-Do not submit work that is against the license of the author, for example: taking a Creative Commons Attribution Template and changing the images, and removing the author's credits. Do not post other people's work as your own.
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This is to say, editing open source templates is technically ok. But not giving credit as in CC license, is not.

These template copies are not contributing to the community, rather they are discouraging legitimate template authors.

We need some quality control...Not sure but this would be a perfect job for mods???

can an admin or mod check their registration IPs and compare hashed passwords?

Kirby makes a good point that has been discussed before, and will be again and again unless address sooner than later.

Having said that...

They are not idiots if we allow and accept them knowingly. If it's within the 'rules' as to what we want to accept then they are doing the right thing and doing it well... Don't blame the dog, blaim it's owner type of thing.

However! If we don't want this then we(admins) should let them know... simple. They may not do it anymore? Problem fixed.

If we choose to accept them then like a previous discussion I think it makes this site look dumb, and yes Kirby may be right in that it may discourage other designers.

- I personally think this site is under danger of becoming a repository of identical templates with a the odd decent one intermingled within them. I'd rather see 1 original template a week rather than 5 identical ones in a day.

Can the admins step in with their thoughts about what can be done intially? That is if a template is identified as being too similiar then a generic email asking them not to do this could be sent out? That is at least something?

And let me point out the bleeding obvious... we are talking about the blatantly obvious ripoffs and copies here.

This is where mods could do with more control to moderate the designs as well as the forum. Maybe have a requirement for at least 3 mods to accept a design is not original before it is deleted?

Cheers, Pete

i agree... i can't see them giving each other high fives around the office on how happy they are with their design work each time they do this.

SEO purposes for sure, but potentially at our expense. Even this discussion will help them as they got their link mentioned again... grrrr

Posted By: greg... are they just run through the w3 validator and that's it?

I think so, that's why the mods can help with this as above. I think it's too much for the 3 admins to remember all the templates.

@wfiedler: I am an admin, and I do care. I am not the one doing design approvals at this point and it's been a very long time, a good 5-6 months since I've done approvals.

I would also like to know who is doing the design approvals lately. We do have a system in place where who ever is doing the approvals can 1 view the design before it's approved, 2 run it threw the W3C validator, 3 create a screen shot, then either 4 approve or not approve the design.

It's true not everyone can remember all the designs but obviously people do remember them once they are up and approved.

My first question is who has been doing design approvals the past couple months? It would help to save time for you either a moderator or fellow admin to speak up. Looking at logs, etc is a pain.

Once we know who is doing the approvals at this point, we can put things in place to 1, get a better policy in place and 2, have a way to easily remove duplicates.

Posted By: perthmetroidea #534 from Pete:

Maybe only allow 2 designs from the same designer to be approved per month to prevent copycats clogging up the system?

PS. and Wolfram don't you dare stop submitting designs!! We need someone to keep things original here!

I second what Perthmetro said about Wolfram (GORGEOUS STUFF!) and wanted to add that part of the problem appears to be duplicate or triplicate IDs - like freecsstemplates and Templatest and fctemplates all seem to be almost mirrors of each other in terms of both name and design (and typos/errors) ... so perhaps make sure that people only had ONE ID and could post a limited number of designs (and those designs would be checked against each other too to not be duplicates (with the exception perhaps of one design having several color schemes in ONE submission) perhaps? What do y'all think?

That would be good .. maybe take a look at what flagging system something like craigslist.org uses? they allow you to flag whether its in the wrong catagory, prohibited, best of, spam, etc, and it takes several flags before a posting is removed ...

@pete: but that doesn't stop people from registering multiple accounts like we are seeing now.

I agree Karen but no matter what we do or don't do, we'll have knuckle heads... we just need to stay strong and have the core people who are not offending keep up with doing things to blow the copycats out of the water

well I am a founding admin... and was one at oswd and owd... and i'm pretty active... and even more so now that it seems the others are busy... i am also talking with moderators off site to come up with solutions for us... stay tuned...

Eh I think we have a few less than ten mods now...
Anyway, I'm here and willing to help!
And Sean, you've been around so long...what are you now, 120 years old??

(You know I'm kidding. I wish I looked old...so people who IDed me actually took me seriously )

I'm not gonna stop submitting templates.. But, i'm getting sick of waiting weeks and weeks to get my template on the frontpage, only to have it bumped down a day later by five template clones. I also think the clones are part of the reason for the low download rates lately.

I'm gonna stop submitting my templates temporarily, until this is fixed. Good idea wolfram.

Well we do have 10 mods and 3 admins. They can be viewed on our board page.

The issue is mods and admins being active on the site, especially here on the forums when we discuss things like this.

Posted By: Sean@pete: but that doesn't stop people from registering multiple accounts like we are seeing now.

But it's a start... or would it just encourage multiple signups?

As per my previous... lets get a 2-3 mod consensus on who is a copier, send them an email asking them to stop, then if no joy bann em

@greg: thats kinda what i was getting at. We are noticing but we dont have the ability to make it right.

Posted By: gregthe solution: make the users who are noticing these duplicate designs into moderators.

Lol, we'd have a lot of mods.. I personally could find the original for every single template these guys have ripped. It's my specialty lmao.

its not even lie they are improving the templates.... they make them suck. lol

maybe the templates are still being approved because....
THE APPROVER IS THE MAKER OF THE LOW QUALITY TEMPLATES =0=0=0=0=0=0=0 CONSPIRACY!!!!!111two

"OD QUALITY CONTROL TASK FORCE DELTA"

I love it! Perfect, and we'll get that Flash guy to lead us into battle and beat the living sh... sorry I'm getting a bit carried away now... time for my Ritalin.

Posted By: SeanPollock

maybe the templates are still being approved because....
THE APPROVER IS THE MAKER OF THE LOW QUALITY TEMPLATES =0=0=0=0=0=0=0 CONSPIRACY!!!!!111two

I thought all along but was too scared to say... Sean! You're gonna meet Flash who's gonna show you his friend Mr PAIN! Oh dear where is my Ritalin!