1. This is always a good practice, no matter where you're commenting. I also copy the body of my posts before clicking publish.

Timethief is a wonderful person, who was one of the first people I met on the wordpress.com forums. Had it not been for Options, I would never have visited them in the first place. Timethief has amassed over 7,000 posts of wonderful support for the bloggers at wordpress.com. So I find it completely shocking that:

• Both of them were asked to leave the forum
• Shortly thereafter, their forum accounts were suspended
• Timethief's blog, WPBloggingTips (yes, it's a blog that archives the helpful advice she gives out on the forums, so that the google-inclined can help themselves) was marked as "mature"1 .
• Timethief's IP was blacklisted in Akismet's spam database2

I'm honestly not as surprised that wank and options were banned from the forums. Their blogs, like mine, focus on highlighting issues with wordpress (theirs more the .COM side). The idea that automattic would go out of its way to silence Timethief, who has always held the community as her highest priority, is nonsensical.

This is a warning to anyone considering the use of Automattic's services: They do not have your interests in mind, and if you are ever displeased with the service you receive, they will not hesitate to use those services as weapons against you. Even for people considering the use of just Akismet, it should be disconcerting that you are not subscribing to an anti-spam service, you are subscribing to automattic's vehicle of censorship.

For your own sake, use Defensio, use Vox, tumblr, or blogspot, but stay away from wordpress.com, akismet, and wordpress.com stats. They will violate your privacy, and they will revoke their services at signs of your dissatisfaction.

1. The mature flag, if you're not aware, is the means by which blogs on wordpress.com are hidden from public view and denied the use of categories or tags. This, rather than the sensible solution of putting up an "Under 18" warning that blogspot employs.
2. Since Automattic, Inc. does not follow up with ISP's (or bloghosts for the splogs that are advertising via spam), she has no recourse with Telus.net to get a new IP address. So much for automattic caring a wit for the health of the blogging community.

I think I'm missing something -
so I make this "killer" GPL, CSS only theme. you sell it for $50, on the premise that it's not a generic XXL poncho (I know you said pink, but what you meant was gray with a blue hood). Immediately on release, any self-hosted blog can download it and install it themselves. Since it's CSS-only, anyone on wordpress.com can pay for the CSS Upgrade and start using it. Suddenly it seems like my theme is another XXL poncho, and the guy who bought it trying to get a unique design is seriously screwed.
I must be thinking about this wrong.

It's not that there aren't perfectly valid revenue models based on the GPL. It's just that this is the only one that isn't.  Once a GPL slice of code is released1 , it can be redistributed by everyone. There are (very few) projects that actually sell GPL-ed code.  X-chat for windows is the one that comes to mind. It works because compiling source code on windows is such a pain.  The more viable methods of making money from GPL software include selling support2, and selling proprietary add-ons.

The way the latter option works with wordpress themes is that the underlying PHP has to be GPL, but the CSS can be any license.  Matt, instead is looking for CSS-only, GPL themes.  This gets extra bizarre in that any CSS-only theme can be implemented by anyone with the CSS upgrade.  Since the themes are GPL, automattic can't even legally suggest that they shouldn't do that.

Designing premium themes is already a tough market. At least designers willing to handle the storefront themselves aren't further hampered by having to open-source their graphics. Arpit is right to question the sensibility of such a marketplace, and Michael Martin reaches a similar conclusion.

1. Meaning, once it's been bought, but in this context, Matt is saying that it will also be made available to self-hosted users
2. CSS support on wordpress.com is currently volunteer-only, staff refuse to touch it

Now that there are a substantial number of drop-in sandbox skins for differing verions of the Sandbox, I'm working on a catalog of all the designs, so that wordpress.com users and other sandboxers can find designs easily.  There have been several requests in the wordpress.com forums for a list like this, and the Sandbox Wiki seems as good a place for it as any.

This skin is for WordPress.com Users. feel free to use this skin ‘as is’. the images are hosted on wordpress.com, so it’s no different than hosting them yourself. If you host your own blog, please get the zipped version of the skin.

Credits

A List Apart's article on typesetting (followed to the letter because IE sucks)
Joen Asmussen's brilliant idea about adding columns without touching the markup
Dezinerfolio's web2.0 layer styles
KDE's Oxygen icons project
Datestamps inspired by the cover of Eero Saarinen, designed by CoDe Communication and Design

Description

Designed for the Sandbox Designs Competition, this CSS design is an experiment in layout. There are two sidebars stacked vertically. The second sidebar stacks horizonally, visually making 2 sidebars out of 1.

License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; version 2 of the License.

Installation

Select the Sandbox-10 theme (currently on page 4).  Then open the download link below, and copy the contents into the Edit CSS box, Making sure to check the "Start from scratch and just use this" box.  If you'd like to customize the graphics, be sure to check out the Photoshop files, which you can abuse to your heart's content.

Download

Walk in the Shadows CSS