@Jeffro -

The credit thing has been in place for both guidelines for a long time. The system seems to have worked. Only now am I really seeing a shift to have the same guideline for plugins applied to themes. What is truly broken because of the guideline mis-match

The requirement that the plugin provide a user-configurable option to enable/disable the credit link, and that such option default to "disabled" is actually quite new (basically, since Mark's recent blog post). So, it is only natural that the issue would arise now.

What if I create a poll and I ask the question, should the credit link guideline for plugins also be applied to themes? Have Yes or No as the answer and then wait for the results. If the majority of people were to vote No because they are quite happy with the link showing up by default for their theme? Do you think make the change for the sake of consistency between the guidelines for each repository or do you leave things alone because the votes have shown they are ok with the way things are.

Internet polls are notoriously unscientific. Results must be evaluated accordingly.

More importantly, I would hope that decisions would be made based on what is obviously right and wrong moreso than an unscientific internet poll.

Ok, but in the same vein, I don’t think it’s good to spend all your time and energy on something that is not detrimental to the WordPress project in it’s entirety. This guideline will not bring the project to its knees.

I'm not expending much time or energy on this matter. I'm just commenting on your post (which, coincidently, happened to be about the differences between allowable links in plugins and themes). I'm not particularly upset about it; I'm just speaking up about something I see to be wrong.

Just seems like on an issue such as this one, you and Andreas are going to have to muster up a pretty strong group of vocal people who feel the same way regarding the guidelines and hope that change happens because of it. Let me email Matt and point him to this post and a few comments and let’s see if he chimes in.

I'm also not really interested in recruiting the torch and pitchfork brigade. I just get tired of hearing poor arguments for decisions such as these.