I'm using a theme that has been marked with a blue ?. The text below the description says the theme has been abandoned.

My question is this:
If the theme has been abandoned and is 6 years old, can I remove the reference to the coder and just leave the link to zenphoto? I am altering the theme to black and the footer text just looks tacky.

the Life in Blue
theWholeLifeToLearn

No, even if the theme is abandoned you should not modify any author references build in. Although the GPL licence would generally allow that for code if all author notices in the source are left intact. But this is also about the design itself which GPL is not directly a licence for.

However, the author is still the author and I think if you only changing the colors a bit it should be left where it is. If you really want to be sure you should contact the author. Sadly the website we noted seems to be abandoned as well…