The License Agreement prohibits altering the copyright notice displayed at the bottom of your forum. All copyright notices within source files and as generated by the Software as output are retained, unchanged.

Altering the copyright notice will terminate your license to use SMF, and may result in a warning message at the bottom of your forum.

The SMF version number is considered separate the copyright itself, and altering it is not considered a violation of the license. Altering the SMF version number may make it more difficult for the SMF team to offer appropriate help tailored to your version of SMF.

In rare cases you may notice a message on the bottom of your forum that states that your forum is missing the SMF copyright. The SMF software has been designed to detect whether an approved version of the copyright notice has been used on your forum. Chances are it is a minor issue and is easy to resolve.

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

• Editing the copyright message - You removed required information from the copyright string "$forum_copyright", you edited function theme_copyright, or you removed the call to "theme_copyright()" from your theme. Any of these actions is most likely a violation of the SMF license agreement. The generally approved method of adding additional copyright information (pertaining to a site, theme, or mod) is to add this after the call to "theme_copyright" in index.template.php.

• Theme incompatibility - Installing a theme intended for 1.1 on 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.

If a user sees a warning message on their forum, it is likely that something they have done has altered the copyright function. If the admin is seeing these messages, they should check the mods which they recently installed and uninstall it as soon as possible.

Outdated language files can also cause this message to show. If that is the cause, the admin should visit the Downloads Page and download updated language packs.

The SMF copyright must remain on all forums. If it is removed, Simple Machines reserves the right to seek legal action. You cannot alter, remove, or hide the copyright tag at the bottom of any SMF forum in any way, with the exception of having written permission from Simple Machines.

Also, you are not allowed to alter or remove any credit information from the SMF source code. You cannot copy any part of the SMF source code, or claim any SMF code is yours.

Please read The Simple Machines License for further information.

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Related Reading: SMF License Agreement