Burying (hiding) the affiliate link code?
 

Hiya,

I'm looking for the best way to ensure that more experienced surfers can't just snip the end off a Free Hosted Site URL and cause an affiliate to lose credit for their signup. Ideally we'd want to send surfers who snipped a URL to a page where all the links still had the affiliate code which had been 'buried' down further in the original URL.

I know I read it here somewhere but none of my searches have turned up the thread I'm looking for. In the thread there was a discussion of constructing links to Free Hosted Sites, and the poster (I can't remember who it was) showed how to put the affiliate code inside what appeared to be a directory address instead of at the end of the link as a query string.

Something like this I think:

http : // www . site . com / affiliateID / hosted_gallery_index.html

Then there was the part I'm not sure about, which I think was the matching htaccess file code and a sample index page.

Does anyone remember the thread that had that post? Or maybe remember posting it yourself?

TIA for any help,

Simon

http://www.greenguysboard.com/board/...ad.php?t=15875

That's probably the thread you were looking for :)

...or the one sparky posted :)

Sorry, CD, I didn't get a chance to post a reply to you on that thread before I opened this one.

Your idea of putting it at the end with a ".html" extension is very much like what we want to do. We just want to move the affiliate code down even further in the URL.

Let's see...maybe I should have explained that our affiliates use CCBill's IDs, which are just 6 digits. And I think some people will try editing out something like "657632.html" from the end of a free hosted site URL, particularly if the directory one level down sounds interesting (which it might if we had the free site's name in that position).

So I'm still looking for how to construct a link to defeat that, and how to write the htaccess (or config) code that will do what we want.

Any suggestions on that, or pointers to that other thread I mentioned would be much appreciated.

Simon

Exactly right, thank you!

If I could have just remembered your quote I'd have found the post in friggin' heartbeat:

"...the surfer will not fuck around with the URL itself, because they might end up not getting the free porn"

That was just what I was looking for, thanks again! |thumb

Simon

Yep, that's the one!

Thanks man!
|thumb

Simon

You're welcome :)