PSA - Are you using this wordpress theme?

Are you using the WordPress "Newspaper X" theme from themeforest?

I had some clients report their websites were "broken" using the Newspaper theme. Instead of their website content being displayed it was replaced with something else. As it turns out their developers decided to put in code that checks for a valid license and if the license was invalid they completely replaced your website with their own content (see Website Content Getting Displayed link below).

Unfortunately, the developer fucked up the code to the point where all license checks were failing whether you had a valid key or not.

Sure, it's understandable the developer wants to protect their assets from becoming freely available but was the risk worth it?


I definitely would think twice before you use themes by this developer.


For those who are using this theme, I made version 11.3.2 freely available that has the developer's fixes in place. Download here.

NulledCode said:

I had some clients report their websites were "broken" using the Newspaper theme. Instead of their website content being displayed it was replaced with something else. As it turns out their developers decided to put in code that checks for a valid license and if the license was invalid they completely replaced your website with their own content (see Website Content Getting Displayed link below).

Click to expand...

This is just fckd up, same behavior that FlyingPress did. Not cool at all, if I paid for a license and decided to stop paying, they should just stop giving me updates and support, not fck up my site that I paid for. Thanks for "fixing" the problem.

Exactly. FlyingPress is who I thought of too. Doing something like this is all risk and zero reward.

NulledCode said:

they completely replaced your website with their own content (see Website Content Getting Displayed link below).

Click to expand...

Can they really do such a thing? is it legal?

I don't understand why theme developers do this. If they want to put a license check, they can implement it on the admin side instead of the public facing side. Just one licensing key error and boom, website is defaced resulting in lost income and reputation.

I have seen a lot of complaints about newspaper theme in the past. Envato market and theme forest themes have lot of problems. They include nulled plugins with their theme. I don't know how this is allowed. If you gonna buy a theme with nulled plugin might as well buy nulled theme.
Also, the theme authors don't include updates to the nulled plugin after a few months of purchase hosting company and security plugins will start flagging the outdated nulled plugins.
Moral of the story don't buy themes from theme forest and envato market. It's full of scammer authors.

Luckily I switched from Newspaper to Generatepress in 2019. My best move so far when using Wordpress.

That's quite messed up man. It's not even funny. This is just cavalier of them. I stopped reading that press release after they mentioned, 'accidentally'.

That's very terrible. I can even imagine this happening to me when lots of efforts went into my website even after buying a theme. Sorry about that man