Why does this theme "call home"?
 

I've noticed that whenever I save settings in Admin, my Firefox browser says, "Waiting for wordpress.bytesforall.com" in the Status Bar. Why is that? Although I like this theme, I'm concerned about privacy.

Actually this isn't the theme calling home, it's WordPress doing a version check. I think if you load and activate any theme, you will see the same thing happening.

It would be nice if there was a switch in wordpress to do it say once a week instead of every time. You might want to put a query out on WordPress.org and ask why this is happening.

It's an iframe in bfa_ata_admin.php that loads a javascript page from bytesforall.com - not wordpress. When I removed the iframe, it worked fine and much faster because it wasn't waiting for bytesforall.com. I've loaded several other themes and none behave like this. I don't think this is a Wordpress function - I think Atahualpa calls home probably to check for the most current version - alerting you if it is not. Still, the fact is it calls home each time you make a change to it in admin - which slows down admin functions on my site sometimes to a crawl, freezing up Firefox at times while it waits. And as I don't know what information it is gathering and sending in the process, I'm concerned.

BTW, did I mention that Atahualpa is the future of Wordpress. Truly inspired coding, putting everything in admin instead of having to directly edit files on the server. Awesome!

I'll ask Flynn about it.

The iframe is being loaded in the admin area of Atahualpa and nowhere else, and the reason it may have slowed down the Atahualpa admin area yesterday was that wordpress.bytesforall.com was down for 1 hour.

The only thing it sends is the Atahualpa version number - nothing else. It allows me to display a one line message at the top of the Atahualpa admin area. I have not used that the last few months but was using it until a few months ago and plan to use it again. This does neither harm nor slow down the site, nor is it unusual. It is in Atahualpa since the beginning and not new.

Again: This is NOT on the front end and does NOT slow down the site,even if my server is down.

Other themes or plugins might be using other techniques or display messages on the global WP dashboard. There are even popular plugins that load things on the front end from their own domain, something Atahualpa doesn't.