How to Encrypt Footer Links in vBulletin Templates

[Gursimran]

I am a temlpate designer and coder. Can anyone tell me how to encrypt code in vBulletin.

I want to encrypt footer links.

[proxykinz]

Here is a great article written by Abishek Tripathi on how to encrypt footer links in Wordpress. You might be able to convert these instructions to work under vBulletin.

Now it’s a relatively known fact that people tend to strip attribution links once they acquire designs from those free, open source design inventories. Be it Open Source Web Design templates, or Wordpress Themes, this has become a problem of many a developers and designers.

A designer/developer invests time in creating a theme, and this is generally done to spread the word linking to their portfolio. Now there are very few people who let these attributions stay, most tend to strip them off. (Heck! Even I did it, in the last theme I was using. Alright, go on, shoot me)

Here what I am going to teach you is to encode your footer links, such that when displayed in a PHP file it will look nothing more but gibberish text, but when the PHP file is called for it will output proper html text.

Let’s Begin

Let’s suppose we wanted to add some unremoveable text (e.g. a link back to our site) to the footer of a Wordpress theme. We could place some code in the theme’s functions.php file that looks something like this:

<?php
function theme_credits()
{
echo ‘Designed by <a href=”http://www.abhishektripathi.com”>Abhishek Tripathi</a>.’;
}
add_action(‘wp_footer’,‘theme_credits’,30);
?>

The function theme_credits in the above code echoes a simple link back to our site, and the next line of code registers it as one of the functions called in the footer of the theme — or wherever you placed the bit of code:

<?php wp_footer(); ?>

Anyone with a little PHP knowledge could figure out what we’re up to almost immediately — which is where encryption comes in.

At the very least we’ll need a couple of two-way encryption functions. One has to be text-based, and the other [optionally] byte-based. We’ll settle on base64_encode and gzdeflate. The text-based function encrypts the output of the byte-based function and outputs something we can paste in a text editor.

If we Echo:

<?php
echo base64_encode(gzdeflate(
‘function theme_credits()
{
echo \’Designed by <a href=”http://www.example”>Example Designs</a>.\’;
}
add_action(\’wp_footer\’,\’theme_credits\’,30);’
));
?>

We get the string:

VY7LCsIwFET3gv9w6SYtlERwZx8r/Y4QkxsTMA/SSBTx35WWLJzVmcUcR
j+8zDZ4yAYdcplQ2by03X4Ha95QCaUJQM642JtHBdcXjAJMQj0 1Jud4YqyUQv
EpXLwjlcE182UrsI1GJmZKhur7/MyVhVJcrD9aUiLXIWRMpCd/p0h/PHTDFw==

To run the code, we decrypt, then call eval on it:

<?php
eval(gzinflate(base64_decode(‘VY7LCsIwFET3gv9w6SYtlERwZx8r/Y4QkxsTMA/SSBTx35WWLJzVmcUcRj+8zDZ4yAYdcpl
Q2by03X4Ha95QCaUJQM642JtHBdcXjAJMQj01Jud4YqyUQvEpXLwjlcE182UrsI1GJmZKhur7/MyVhVJcrD
9aUiLXIWRMpCd/p0h/PHTDFw==‘)));
?>

This is alright as is, but calling echo instead of eval on the string will reveal our code. For an increased layer of complexity, we can have it eval over and over again. Here’s a simple loop you can use to generate the code:

<?php
$text = ‘function theme_credits()
{
echo \’Designed by <a href=”http://www.example.com”>Example Design</a>.\’;
}
add_action(\’wp_footer\’,\’theme_credits\’,30);’; // our code
$num_times = 20; // number of times to encrypt
for ($i = 0; $i < $num_times; $i++) {
$text = “eval(gzinflate(base64_decode(’” . base64_encode(gzdeflate($text)) . “‘)));”;
}
echo $text;
?>

The output in this case is:

eval(gzinflate(base64_decode(‘DdJHDqxWAkDR5dgWA6 DIsjwgP3KOkxaxSEXOq++/hHt0qzMb/v6+7VgP2V79nWdbReL/K6
tiKqu//xJSUxKXN2J7Pu5JJ0GEJtC+diGPxe/EuB2WtRX+0LpLTq8MMwf2I5cbeiZ4I9/T02+YCEMjrUMMo9
XZO9SFtJ6uYL2R2Q7BTr7pXgCik59IGSWZvpH73PHiEt806hst 3FwtR7urIATeMrweGnkCge8RPbzQ+zo4vaeK+
Uuu+TNMu33sRIcPDR1N+l774IE76G767ehYZ2zK8n2hWmfcGHX alVk5k8efagmfX4bWVItyCV6×2l6DZo5EiM6NRbMtx
4+xGZoctm3maiS1cunjUFpwZp3MPJDxCRuyqBJVet9ZvFb3cRC vZBOa8m2v+VaASZksNan78Uuhq1h9ke1EHX0y
JKE8YVNf+oETDpF9eD3E/Cu3Mnfp+42t/vscCiwmj4nybJvigNuum29elpzTEI9sgC3JrFc/8BrR1t+71OFerf0o2vfGBr
IwvKJbnYxxOoqGrPx0qYkdmsq4+VcbVJ5vt4VvuryiqBZnaOKo V9Kw/eTjO7VpZgG23OtQuO6HLopTuTMzqMJXBhQl
4p8ax/yOuIJYP1whbXcm6cDCJvSh5gUNZtgsTBYjsEqWqMB3Tg1IPalW +svS9mUsnN8em1rEn4tpqVBOzVrTS9aH
BW5zG7au6fsQEQWLY806ou29EucPU1gYPqwgJBcvtecNbKYKgd s6AP0T1lJBkbaiiLpkfUF8c9KE2bB0S1HyosCu/zp
Dls8OPX1hCknGEyQsvUu/NF/4+kOWRsCo8VRFJ3bPOl+NstzaOI/xj4H6nDHvXKa8qh2k0Q3pJjmHbp4COGdy+RgvH
xD0K0jyPkF0RPcdv2cFJuQfYphTibXl3L11jhd+ncujARJO+OQ LnIhipicR2HE326GDncCHl0UukRwvCxgNByXUyZqA7N
X3KvppzES/me0eL3iVaNC6aEfMeFIUDwzMH5n2iSa/D/1B3EX6ykrECXz2vIX3pwnw0wRzF/k5SE4VQZsdx74VFZW
MxW33dLAL3PYKuoGBL8a+v/1RQcIcUwQHW94qgdJwmfGP8RuvItoxgiyLwR4XlA/wTF9P04tL/aBzbCy/11BDcPgjN
PSCUkLi6Hgvo+acmXXOcQCGPIBV/yLSd4di+/jBlTU6YLdvIaJ/3q+wmD0wcYpo6yDM42uuC5hNSqZorqDOaMkZ7+
/3rnXF6s5OebZW32orxTuqHkF8KAzY9TidRpZ5fer9Di1vupuUO cOytxf5NN1A+QQQXV4yJ3hIkBogpn2uoiAjQSgf3H
TA+bqMXjgq5IaFmTLQs8FIuv0dIHvnndOzupWpd1aXWUQNbMUa JY61EZfgmB5fPqGFi8ezogEDJjcHlzbnwUDy+Apz
GMtl1DYN4SQcBlc+dR7kxyQxUj8jQpcG5v2dtlsxDR+J4p0DW+ mbJ39zhdq5qaMN+pGRSNyy41WNaM80PMKVGYIErg
ufrZB3muO0IXSPCy1qQ5FFQQ1puoMZpe6yDepTbWBbyMXRiXyj Ln04xO9abN8Fr6In9Mw6APvgeMwihkhI/DB7Ppxf
H5GVvy4C8UBLxpKkEln13PlIAeRQCP/1IPvjHZPYBPKHakBh+lO/mD5Ormuv2BoIyk8dm6wOX9h0YYsbyw5Yj/ZTrI+Z
yr/vvFOWFo35K51op51WPdfX0NyB7dvGqCxxbT9DEoHZGQ49ptQlC z8Z4u0Qa7kTjuz2QAE9LUWcxnhLplVIrswoIJfy
eljn4gDFXCX4IrdQkkl0arP40m7j7OVjw9aF+Ef/a8NYOLcwEWV6NN1TgBIPYaLqHRoG/TNZU4n+9bJJM/nrCcMQdF
R1DVOMff3331///PPPv/8H’)));

So there you have it: a way to hide your code.

Hope some of you find it helpful. Happy Developing.

Note: For all encrypted strings posted here, ignore the new lines. I had to do them so the theme won’t break.