CCBill links with encoded '&' don't work

[Toby]

cd34 posted the following in a blogging forum thread, but the ramifications are widespread enough that I felt it needed more exposure.

http://www.greenguysboard.com/board/...19&postcount=5

In lay terms, if your CCBill referral links use & in place of just the & the CCBill cookie identifying the affiliate does not get set.

Some web editors have a habit of encoding ampersands and other special characters as you type them, as that is the correct way to code if you want your pages to validate.

I did a search through the hundreds of galleries I've made over the last couple of years, and I did find several dozen with encoded referral links.

I will also start doing a spot check on sponsor hosted galleries to make sure those links do not contain encoded ampersands.

Hopefully someone from CCBill will see this and bump it up the line to the right people to find a resolution on their end. I would guess that fair number of affiliate sales are going uncredited due to this issue.