Banned for affiliate links in a free WordPress theme

Not to be outdone by their recent 1 million active install celebration, Astra finds itself in some hot murky water.

The theme was recently suspended when the theme review team found affiliate links “cloaked” in buttons recommending other plugins. Friend of the show Ron Huereca shows us a code snippet of how they achieved this, and LayerWP hosted a short written interview with a member of the theme review team.

In today’s episode, I’ll share my take on the matter and where I’d love to see the theme repo move to for small product creators. You can read the theme guidelines cited in the episode, here.

Also mentioned in the episode:

Every word of this Tweet (down to the ALT text on the image) remains true more than a year later. It's a shame that this is still allowed in WordPress. https://t.co/0iTAXx94uP— Ben Meredith (@benUNC) August 8, 2020

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Read the full transcript

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Matt: (00:04)This episode of the Matt report is brought to you by search wp.com and gravity view.co more on them. Later in today’s episode, we’re talking about the recent Astro debacle of just some thoughts around WordPress monetization. What it’s like to be a product creator, a product maker in the WordPress space, especially in the year 2020, let’s dive right on in.

Matt: (00:29)All right, everybody. Welcome back to the mat reports. It’s maryport.com [inaudible] dot com slash subscribe to join that mailing list. For those of you that know they started a new job a couple of weeks ago over at Casto the makers of a seriously simple podcasting plugin. I’ll be the head or actually no, my official title is director of podcaster success. So I’m gonna help folks get their podcasts up and running over at Casos. If you’re thinking about starting a podcast yourself, send me an email, Matt at [inaudible] dot com and, uh, I guess some more videos up on the plugin Tut channel youtube.com/plugin Tut, check out all of my WordPress plugin theme tutorials. I’m going to get into some no-code stuff that just, uh, those are the things that, that really excite me. So some know code stuff that’s in and around the WordPress space. So do check out that channel recently, a