K, dont throw any ninja stars at me for making this post.
What are your thoughts on removing encrypted footer links on free wordpress themes.
Yes the themes are free, and some authors "expect" you to leave the links on.
For example
http://www.newwpthemes.com
they have clean style themes, very easy to modify, but they add a nasty dashboard widget to contact their server, and also spammy footer links encoded.
note: I did write a shel script to remove all the encoded links and dashboard widget without breaking the themes code.
Just want your input since this is a tough question