Theme Builder

Apologies in advance for this comment being a bit verbose, but there are legal aspects to it and it's a very common question so I'm answering several forms and aspects of this question in one go

Atlassian's Product EULA (clause 7.d) states:

(d) with respect to any use of the Product, include an attribution to Atlassian to be included on all user interfaces in the following format: "Powered by Atlassian", which must in every case include a hyperlink to http://www.atlassian.com, and which must be in the same format as delivered in the Product.

As a result, our [Theme Builder EULA] (clause 8.4) exists:

8.4 with respect to any use of the Theme Builder Product, provide an attribution to both Adaptavist and Adaptavist which is to be included on all user interfaces customised with the Product in the following format: "Adaptavist Theme Builder powered by Atlassian Confluence", which must in every case include a hyperlink to http://www.adaptavist.com and http://www.atlassian.com respectively.

Specifically, with prior written agreement from Atlassian, this allowed the default attribution line to be shrunk from something like this:

Powered by Atlassian Confluence 2.7.1, the Enterprise Wiki. Bug/feature request - Atlassian news - Contact administrators

To this:

Adaptavist Theme Builder powered by Atlassian Confluence

However, on our website you'll notice that we've further customised the footer. We were able to do this because we retained the visible attribution statements by adding the following notation to the Footer panel:

{copyright} 2007 Adaptavist.com Ltd.{copyright} All rights reserved worldwide | ...
Site powered by Atlassian's [Confluence|ADAPTAVIST:Confluence] wiki customised
with Adaptavist's [Theme Builder|ADAPTAVIST:Builder] and [Community Bubbles|ADAPTAVIST:Bubbles] plugins.

(Edited markup to stop page width going crazy)

We then hid the "powered by" footer (which is otherwise uneditable to ensure at least some compliance with EULA's regardless of how the theme is customised) using CSS:

#poweredby {
 display: none;
 visibility: hidden;
}

The result can be seen at the bottom of this web page For a full tutorial on how we did the design of our website, see Adaptavist Website Theme v4 in our Tutorials section.

Theme Builder 4.0 Milestone 9 and above

Please note that we've changed the ID of the attribution message from 'poweredby' to 'attribution' in Builder 4.0 M9 and later.

All that is well and good, and I understand. BUT...

With any wiki, content management system, what-have-you, eventually somebody somewhere is going to find a security hole. Then they're going to write an evil robot that searches google for all sites that can be identified as using that particular system, so as to try to make the greatest exploit of that security hole until such time as it is plugged.

So, for the intranet, behind the firewall, no problem complying with that "you must give us credit and brag about how great we are" clause of the EULA.

But for a site publicly exposed to the internet, it would be, for completely reasonable security considerations, be my intent to make the site look entirely like it is a 100% static html site, built with UltraEdit, or Notepad, or vi for that matter. That is, "Don't even bother knocking, there is nothing interesting or hackable here. Go play somewhere else."

You see, I've been messed with in such a manner before (using a L.A.M.P.-based CMS). And they didn't target the sites I'd designed because of the content or political reasons or whatever. Nope - the only reason we were targeted is because the "powered by" text at the bottom of each and every page of these websites made them all easy to find via google (or any other search engine).

So - ideas about a compromise. How about a graphic that contains the same line of text, in a non-robot-searchable manner, which is then linked to a tinyurl that makes the connection to your website (and Atlassian's) a somewhat more anonymous trail that an human would figure out, but the robots wouldn't as likely?

OR - how about if our internal, editable version of the site (one of the spaces in our wiki intranet, behind the firewall) allowed us a way to export a public version that is 100% static html, but still works almost exactly the same? I don't think we need login, or comments, and maybe not even search (let google do that). Workable?

To hide the text in Confluence 3.1/Builder 4, the following works:

#attribution > div {
 display: none;
 visibility: hidden;
}