Hi all,

Can you put yourself in the following situation???

Suppose you have some URLs for affiliate programs, each of which potentially earn you money. However, you are told by all Internet Experts that these URLs are kinda special ones in that they are usually in a form something like

http://www.myprogram.com/userid=me123abc

and that the ‘me123abc’ is the bit that relates to you (it is your affiliate ID or number) and that this bit can be messed with to prevent you from receiving the monies that should be paid to you by your downline.

Someone can (in some way) place their own ‘ID’ :evil: in place of yours, effectively stealing your money, or they could just spitefully use the ‘http://www.myprogram.com’ bit to join as if they had no upline sponsor, which would also prevent you from getting paid.

So, we are told that we should hide these (parts of our) links to prevent this theft and we should do this by using software/services that ‘cloak’ the links so the affiliate ID bit is no longer recognisable.

Are you with me so far? :-|

With these programs, you tend to pay your immediate upline something, the admin something and possibly a random member of the membership something. If the first person to get paid is the immediate upline member, then you can test your own URL by following the procedure and checking that it is really yourself that you’d be paying if you made a payment.

If you follow this test using the ‘raw’ URL (i.e. the one provided by the program itself), you should definitely find that you will be the recipient of payments made by your signups and you can indeed test this whenever the first payee is the immediate upline member. However (and this is my point), not all ‘cloaked’ URLs work correctly! Some of the raw links appear to be more ‘stable’ than others and get cloaked into URLs that also pass the “I get paid� test. For the fragile URLs, it appears that some of the affiliate info gets lost or changed, which totally defeats the object of having an affiliate program membership in the first place!

Has anyone else pondered this? Any solutions?

A method of hiding the affiliate ID is still required to stop the robbers , but the new link that arises after whatever hiding technique is used must act in exactly the same way as the original. In particular, information about payees must not be changed.

Anyone heard of any software that gets around these problems, or knows or any other kind of workaround the problem?

Any advice would be most welcome :lol:

cyman

http://www.hitfun.biz
http://www.silliest.name