Wedge

Agree entirely (and with your footnote). Have a credits/legal/whateveryouwanttocallit page that contains all that [crap] and keep the footer as clean (and brief) as can be.

+1.

Should we have any kind of rules about what can or can't be in the credits page? I'd prefer to leave it a bit more unmoderated if possible, but I think it may require rules at some point >_<

Aw, you're a bit mean, I was going to allow at least 16 bytes per plugin :P

I'm all for developers being credited for their work, I just don't want them to take the piss as they're currently doing for SMF.

Unless they own a 1 letter domain name in a 2 letter TLD (i.e. something like t.co), 16 bytes doesn't help enough ;)

Especially because you know who the worst offender for footer copyrights is.

If it uses an image pack or something similar, then I can understand 2 lines or so, one for the mod, one for the image pack. (WedgeDesk currently does this to credit the Fugue icons, as it is supposed to do)

I've thought about that, actually, because right now the credits are something of a wilderness; a plugin can theoretically override or remove other plugins' credits. On the flip side, moving it to a helper function that receives from hooks - but doesn't allow direct access to other credits runs the risk of creating duplicates if two mods use the same image set. (E.g. two mods use Fugue, you don't need two copies of the Fugue attribution)

Actually AM has always been pretty good about its footer, only activating when - you know - it's actually used on the page. Not what I was thinking of, and more importantly who refitted all the mods they acquired with stupid footer links that never used to be there.

Of the default 2.0 credits, the only things kept were the 2.0 dev people, those who had actually contributed to 2.0's dev in some material fashion.

It's also linked to in the footer as stated, quite visibly under 'Website Credits'. At this point I don't really care if plugin writers will be happy or not.

Really, it comes down to this: if you want to list it on the official site, then that's the rule to play by. Don't like it? Run your own mod site, then you can distribute what you like.

As long as it's not in the master footer on every page, I don't really have a problem with this, though I'd still discourage it.

I'd say no more than one line of copyright.


You see, here's the line that's drawn: too many mods shove their copyrights in the footer on every page unnecessarily. If it modifies that page actively (i.e. more than just a new menu item) then I can see the rationale, but too many mods just shove it in regardless of how much code of that mod runs on that page. Never mind the fact that the footer isn't big enough to put much in the way of ads into anyway (and now file edits aren't possible in the core plugin manager, so you have even less opportunity to shove it in)

As far as I'm concerned, mod authors gave up the right to have their footer copyright when it started to be abused a couple of years back for SMF, when little mods that weren't used on every page got a footer copyright (and all the problems attached with it, like copyrights being left in when the mod is uninstalled, and/or install problems because of them), so because of everyone peeing in the pool, NO-ONE has the right to do so.