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Bandwagonhost banned my friend's affiliate account, one word reason: "ABUSE"
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doesn't really seem to me that kyaky did anything wrong
Bwh is not paying twice, but they have duty to protect their affiliate network, failure to do so will ensure that web property owner select alternative deals. This doesnt mean that all visitors via chinese-crappy-review-site will have had existing cookies, but it will be very difficult to determine now, and since the TOS were violated its hey ho here's a check for $0.00
For the referral to be valid the end user must make an explicit action, such as clicking as text or image link (advertise correctly according to the TOS), embedding an image on a say a VPS review page that steal the cookies, robs the original affiliate (that created the exposure) of affiliate revenue.
Its a shitty practice
tl;dr - its abuse
@kyaki is helping a friend. Nothing wrong with it. Link masking is ok, but cookie stuffing might get you banned in several affiliate network. Now it depends on the policy of the affiliate program owner.
He is a big fan of prometeus too. you can check his aff too or ban him if you find something like bandwagonhost said. He told me he did very few sales for prometeus because customers weren't that interested in the prices. I guess his "hack" didn't work on your products.
selective hack, oh no~
One of the main reasons for masking affiliate links is to protect the traffic source. Sometimes this can be used for nefarious purposes, but typically it's because the affiliate doesn't want the upstream to be able to cut him out by going direct.
As an non-native english speaker, I would say languages cause misunderstanding.
my blog is being ddos attacked,the ip was nulled by digitalocean just now !
i added a new ip and google cdn, now it is back !
If I had to speculate about this (this is my personal speculation and should not be trusted), here's how things went:
The owner of zhujiceping.com was using our affiliate program for a while on a fair basis and were not breaking any rules. They did withdraw most of funds over time (what the original poster did not mention is we have paid most out of $80 they earned last year, only a small fraction of $80 is being disputed here).
So yesterday they were testing a way to increase their affiliate commissions by attempting cookie stuffing with a few affiliate programs, including ours. This is when we noticed this in our access logs & suspended their account.
The reason why they checked their account so quickly is because they wanted to see if what they tried actually "worked". I am making this assumption because less than 24 hours passed since the suspension (yet, previous withdrawal was a few months ago). It could be a coincidence though, or they may have been checking their affiliate account on a daily basis... who knows. I could dig deeper into access logs if I absolutely have to.
What bugs me is this waste of everyone's time. If they admitted it and apologized then this would have been resolved instantly. Instead, they play innocent and to those who do not want to dig into all this drama this may not even appear "wrong".
It is not the abuse itself that is killing low end providers (Nodewatch kills most of it), it is the associated waste of time and resources when you have to communicate with the abusers and then deal with paypal chargebacks.
After reviewing the facts, it looks like @dcc's actions are completely justified.
The email and WHMCS screenshot show that within a 3 day period, there were 1000+ visitors, and within that 3 day period $70+ was earned (per the commission amount pending maturation). Unless I'm sleeping and missing something obvious.
I'd be interested to hear from the other providers with affiliate programs used by the OP. It'd be interesting to see what their take is on the traffic based off of their logs. Can someone tag them? I'm on my phone.
Also, why not post some analytics or statistical data on your traffic OP? If you can prove that the amount of traffic you get is significantly higher than the click though rates, you might have a chance.
>
Agree.
Affs using img tab or via a shorten-URL service or other abnormal methods is now sort of common practice with those Chinese VPS review sites nowadays, however, I don't think it's compatible with our Confucian culture. Those VPS review sites should notice their visitors about affiliate links before they click them.
@kyaky Maybe you should tell your friend this saying "瓜田不纳履，李下不整冠" (Don't tidy up your shoes in a melon patch, neither adjust your hat under a plum tree).
Don't count me. He(zhujiceping, the owner) is the only one running the site and the admin for the chat group. He can use google translator for your reply I guess from now on.
I (kyaky) don't know anything else besides what he told me to translate for him. If there was any misunderstanding previously or regarding to this time, i wouldn't know. so please don't get mad at my account.
If he cheated, I will get really angry like you did too because that would be wasting my time as well. I don't know. The original words didn't come from me. I don't want anyone uses me too if that turns out his own fault.
I don't know what happened to you and him previously but I guess I'm done with the passing the words and the translation here.
Good job by @dcc, hopefully others he "tested" on will do the same..
IF "masking affiliate links = abuse"
THEN "snowshoe spamming, phlishing sites, child pornography sites = NOT abuse"
We're not talking about masking links. Masking a link is where something like http://u/digitalocean 302s to http://host/aff.php?343 that's not a issue here
We're talking about embedding these links as images on the review pages so they have the aff rewards due to cookie being set to their aff id when the end user takes no explicit action.
No? That only shows a lot of links being referred to you from a single page. It could be cookie stuffing -- but there's no way to say so for sure.
tl;dr: Only sling mud when you can back it up.
So pretty much he's getting a lot of traffic for BandwagonHost and @dcc doesn't believe it's legitimate?
That's the way I see it, yes.
He's completely justified in his suspension of the affiliate if need be (I don't even think he needs a reason, most ToSes allow for 'no reason' suspensions.) but slinging mud when he didn't save definitive proof on a public forum is a huge no-no in my book.
If we were saving all the proof for every abuse incident, we would have be out of business a long time ago... This is simply impractical.
Once again, this has nothing to do with masked links.
Access log shows it pretty clearly actually if you know how to read it. I really do not want to waste even more time explaining this...
Actually, for whatever reason, that's almost always done by any affiliate-oriented "review" site. The famous /out/companyname URLs.
As for the deception issue... http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2014/02/03/why-affiliate-marketing-is-evil/
It really doesn't, access log shows multiple requests from the same IP in a short period of time but if you look at the referral you'll see it's also accessing multiple pages on the originating site so it's very possible it's some kind of crawler following affiliate links too?
I have looked into the log and you are right, ..84.98 was indeed some sort of a crawler. I am looking further into this.
Also there are some browser extensions which force link pre-fetching which could cause this.
Yes, those records were indeed generated by some sort of a robot.
But how can this be explained:
Notice that there were no other requests from this IP to our webserver. There are many "users" like this one - they request the affiliate link, then the main page (the hidden div I saw in their html code did in fact load not only the affiliate link but the main page too for some reason)
Even if this was some link pre-fetching, where are those links on that referring page?
Then you 'should have' saved excerpts and sent them to him via your ticket system.
Doing so would've avoided this thread altogether. Like I said, while it may very well have been what you're claiming it is -- there's no real way for anyone here to verify that.
Trust us that we know how to read access logs, but as many people have chimed in -- there could be MANY reasons for that; granted none as convenient as cookie stuffing.
But still.
Of course the main page is also loaded. That's what aff.php 301-redirects to.
You are right.
Here's what I have learned from this: I should have taken that god damn screenshot. Also, I should have explained the issue to the customer in the first place.
I apologize to everyone in this topic for the harsh tone of most of my responses here.
Not to turn this into an excuse, but having to deal with this kind of stuff a few dozen times a day turns me into an asshole sometimes...
In the meantime, I have unsuspended this affiliate's account. They run a great blog and I wish them all the best.
Personally(kyaky), I'm not specialized in this cookie stuff. I don't say oh I know this tech if I don't know. You can just give people whatever you believe it's the truth. I'm not saying who is right or wrong because I really don't know.
please forgive me giving him this translation "favor".
Honestly bandwagonhost is one of the most popular providers rated by Chinese community due to its stable network, affordable prices and fast ticket. Some people wondered why Daniel never sleeps because no matter what time they open tickets, they always get fast responses from you. I'm not joking, you can check your existing customers from his affiliate links. Most of them are from China and some customers buy more than 5 VPSes in a row.
but I understand it doesn't make zhujiceping an excuse to cheat if he really did. (I have no idea how this works. the owner of zhujiceping even asked me to setup varnish and nginx cache before. I don't know if he knew this hack too).
If I find out one day that he cheated I promise you I will quit the chat group and make an apology to you for helping a cheater with translation. but at the moment, I don't know it at all.
just a few days before the Chinese new year, his blog was under ddos attack from someone. https://nodeping.com/reports/summary/eclmxeev-t5ag-4937-81e7-zz6sd5k99f8l/744
I don't know which time zone you are in, I don't know if the cache thing or ddos had anything to do causing the weird cookie thing you pasted.
All the best too.
Sites like serverbear is doing that at the same time also, I brought it up on LET when it was first advertised here and yet no one wanted to say anything about it.
I am not trying to accuse you for being biased, but it is just simply marketing trick that many websites used, being Chinese or non-Chinese, to prevent the visitors from knowing if they are clicking on an affiliated link or not.