Copyright - Why am I getting a message saying that it's missing

In rare cases you may notice a message on the bottom of your forum that states that your forum is missing the SMF copyright. Don't panic, chances are it is just a minor issue and is easy to resolve.

There are a few reasons why the missing copyright message might be showing:

Editing the copyright message -You edited the copyright string "$forum_copyright" and removed '. $forum_version. ' from the string or changed it in some other way. You also may have replaced "theme_copyright" in index.template.php with something similar in the template, however this is not allowed. If you want to add your own copyright information you can include what you want after ', theme_copyright, ' in index.template.php. You are allowed to hide the forum version as this mod does but you are not allowed to remove the "$forum_version" string.

Theme incompatibility - Installing a theme intended for 1.1 on 1.0, or 2.0 and vice-versa, will most likely cause the message to appear. Consult the author of the theme to make it compatible with your theme or use a different theme that is compatible with your version. The Default, Babylon and Classic (YaBB SE) themes will work on all versions of SMF as long as their template files were updated properly during each upgrade.

In process of upgrading - If you are upgrading from some version of 1.0 to some version of 1.1, you will encounter this message as the files upload. Don't panic, you've done nothing wrong, it's how it works since the changes in the theme & database are too great, once you've uploaded all the files and run upgrade.php, everything should function as it should.