Hey, WordPress theme developers.

There’s something I’d like to ask you not to do anymore. Don’t do this:

Here, too:

And why not?

You are making a promise to people who visit any blog that uses your theme, and it’s one that may or may not be respected and honored by the blog owner or author.

“Your email address will never be published or shared.”

This type of language or a variant thereof is in an awful lot of WordPress themes. (In the first example above, “never” is even in italics to stress how important this is. Needless to say, on the blog where this notice was found (using a commonly-available theme), comments that didn’t agree with the author had their email addresses published in retorts by the blog author.

Because WordPress provides blog moderators with the email address (and the IP) of users who comment on their posts, the very information that many themes say will not be shared is given to the one person (or people) who have the ability to publish it for other readers of the post to see.

So I say think twice before putting this language in your theme.