[Plugin: Custom Contact Forms] Hidden Link on Contact Forms

  • gymsireland

    (@gymsireland)


    14 years, 10 months ago

    If you didn’t know Custom Contact Form hide a link in your source code, an outdated and bad practice that only hurt websites.

    To remove the hidden link from your blog you need to edit the custom-contact-forms.php file and remove the following code:

    if ($admin_options['author_link'] == 1) $out .= "\n".'<a style="display:none;" href="http://www.taylorlovett.com" title="Rockville Web Developer, WordPress Plugins">WordPress plugin expert and Maryland Web Developer Taylor Lovett</a>';

    Just remove the code or replace the link with a link that you will really like to promote and save the changes.

    HIDDEN LINKS
    Source: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66353

    Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including:

    • Using white text on a white background
    • Including text behind an image
    • Using CSS to hide text
    • Setting the font size to 0

    Hidden links are links that are intended to be crawled by Googlebot, but are unreadable to humans because:

    • The link consists of hidden text (for example, the text color and background color are identical).
    • CSS has been used to make tiny hyperlinks, as little as one pixel high.
    • The link is hidden in a small character – for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph.

    If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages. When evaluating your site to see if it includes hidden text or links, look for anything that’s not easily viewable by visitors of your site.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • shirazdrum

    (@shirazdrum)

    14 years, 10 months ago

    I just don’t understand people who try to do something good but manage to discredit themselves by doing stupid things like this. i honestly was going to donate a few bucks his way but when i saw his link under my contact page i just lost all the respect for his work.

    If you don’t wanna help people, just charge for your work. That doesn’t make you an a$$ but doing things like this does.

    Thanks for putting the info up gymsireland. But a heads up to others, it seems that he changed the link location in his last update. It now resides in custom-contact-forms-front.php .

    And you can not access it from the plugin editor. You should edit it via FTP, that means accessing the file under wp-content/plugins/custom forms contact….

    Either remove the code or add this to it: Taylor Lovett is an a$$hole for sneaking in hidden advertising for himself. WP should remove this plugin and ban him in my opinion.

    esmi

    (@esmi)

    14 years, 10 months ago

    Please contact plugins@wordpress.org.

    Thread Starter gymsireland

    (@gymsireland)

    14 years, 10 months ago

    Hi… Sorry I just forget that there is two ways to delete the link.

    To edit the file you can check any of these two ways:

    1- Using your ftp account download the custom-contact-forms.php file from /wp-content/plugins/custom-contact-forms/. After edit the file upload the file and check the source code of your forms.

    2- Download a fresh copy of Custom Contact Forms and edit the custom-contact-forms.php file. Include the file to the Custom Contact Forms ZIP file and upload the plugin – This is handy if you don’t know your FTP credentials etc.

    shirazdrum – The reason for which I post this is because not only I feel like these types of practices need to be abolished, it is also because i’m been treated like an idiot or i’m telling lies acording to the plugin author.
    (here – Conflict with Google Maps for WordPress
    and here – Hiden Links on Custom Contact Form )

    esmi – I think the plugin is great and i will like to give to the plugin author the opportunity to realize the damage that he can cause to others and to himself by placing hidden links on our blogs. I will like to believe that he will abbandon that practice before somebody contact plugins@wordpress.org.

    Sorry for my english and have a nice day

    shirazdrum

    (@shirazdrum)

    14 years, 10 months ago

    gymsireland

    It is unfortunate to see things like this on WordPress, after all we are here because we believe in sharing and no foul plays. you are absolutly right about the author option; it does not remove the link.

    But many people don’t realize that. Not everyone is reading code with their morning coffee and most WP users are using WordPress ‘because’ they don’t want to read code to begin with. this link is not hurting me because i know how to get rid of it but it hurts unsuspecting users who don’t even know they have it.

    Just a search for the line “WordPress plugin expert and Maryland Web Developer Taylor Lovett” in Google brings up hundreds of websites that has been affected by his deceptiveness and that’s not cool.

    I do like the plugin, but i’m not one bit shy to point out a bad practice. I think he had a chance to correct himself, but he hasn’t. He has known about it for a long long time.

    Thread Starter gymsireland

    (@gymsireland)

    14 years, 9 months ago

    Update.

    The hidden link still on the latest version of Custom Contact Forms (Version 4.7.0.0)

    To remove the hidden link from your blog you need to edit the custom-contact-forms-front.php file and remove or edit the following code:

    if ($admin_options['author_link'] == 1) $out .= "\n".'<a style="display:none;" href="http://www.taylorlovett.com" title="Rockville Web Developer, WordPress Plugins">Wordpress plugin expert and Maryland Web Developer Taylor Lovett</a>';

    Note: I didn’t test this yet, since I know that every update of this plugin comes with a lot of problems 😉

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

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