Remove Themefisher from this directory for spam and unethical behaviour

[gohugoio]

Remove Themefisher from this directory for spam and unethical behaviour

[bep]

I will follow up on this later today, thanks for the heads up.

[mehedi-sharif]

A Message to you(@bep) from Themefisher Team .

What Kind of Impact We Created on the HUGO Community

We have been working for the HUGO industry for the last 4 years. Our journey started by contributing the Airspace Hugo theme to the community. The journey has ended with 28 MIT licensed free themes ( 2600+ stars and 4600+ forks in the GitHub repository ) !!!
Between this journey, the community has created 1300+ HUGO websites utilizing our free themes, and every day about 10+ websites are being developed. Obviously, behind the whole contribution, we have 14 full-time dedicated people. To run these people, we needed bread and butter, which is why we’ve launched commercial themes.
Do you think all these numbers are just referencing spamming activity?

What Mistake We Made?
We released the Statichunt, a jamstack directory, and the codebase was forked from jamstackthemes.dev (no doubt about that). We mentioned this fact everywhere (About Us page, GitHub readme). As we have a lot of themes released under the MIT license, we assumed that you could actually do whatever you want with an MIT license.
Even while creating the themes, we never checked if someone is giving us a credit or not. Our intention was open. But we didn't know that the MIT license directs us to keep the copyright info of the main author. Unfortunately, we removed the copyright info, which was a mistake.
We agree on it.

What was Our Response
Suddenly in one morning, Rob Austin created an issue with so much hate in our repo. Our response was very open, which you will get an idea by checking the thread. Then we thought about what mistake we made to get this kind of reaction where I have a good relationship with Rob.

We investigated the whole issue and immediately fixed it. Our core philosophy is to maintain collaboration with everyone, and I think we were very clear and loud here with our message.

How He Could React
He contributed to another similar directory. So, he simply could have created an issue, made a pull request, contacted us through an email (warn), or shown his reaction in my Twitter profile where I am already connected with him.
However, he didn’t do anything, instead investing a lot of time to actually spread negativity with misleading information about us. I hope he has found his inner peace.

What We are Expecting from You

I’ve mentioned all the things above and urge you to be neutral while investigating the whole issue. I don’t think there is a relation between statichunt and our contribution to the community. Statichunt is still a newborn concept that was released about a month ago. If things are going in the wrong direction, we are ready to shut down the platform.

I admire you as a guide and hope you will show me the path to overcome the crisis. Not for the sake of us rather than the community. The community will miss out on having quality themes. Also, it might create an obstacle for the freshers alongside the old users.

I am concluding here, but I am ready to hear from you and implement that if you need any justification or clarification. To err is human, and we are not above that. We solely believe that we’ve made mistakes that have taken us to this point, and we believe by getting proper direction we can resolve our errors.

Who Won

The person who claimed or forced you to remove the theme has no significant contribution to the community. Whereas we are 14 people and spontaneously contributing to the community. In this circumstance, who will be benefitted? The community? Rob? Or Themefisher?

It feels like we are Ukrainians overpowered by the dominant force. You know what I mean by dominant force.

[bep]

@mehedi-sharif your themes was removed because of the total amount of work they burden me with, which I don't have time for (this is not my full time job). This issue may be the trigger issue, but not the main reason. There are plenty of themes site out there where you can promote your themes.