Best thing to do when a sponsor goes belly up or just stops paying?

[Useless]

I say replace the linking code with another sponsor, probably a dating program or something generic, and wait for the DMCA. Fuck them. They're all greedy peasants who act as if they woke up one morning and suddenly decided to close their affiliate programs within the following 24 hours. On the most part, they've known for months that they would stop crediting affiliate sales, and intentionally give next to no notice in order to keep the traffic rolling in.

[Nymph]

Since I haven't gotten back into building free sites yet, it's easy for me to just remove all ads & such from my LL & TGPS.

I am already thinking about when I do get back to building, and the records I'm going to have to keep for when sponsors go belly up again. I know a lot of you have gone through hell searching down everything.

[Cleo]

Originally Posted by Nymph

I know a lot of you have gone through hell searching down everything.

Actually it is pretty easy for me. I keep a local copy of my server using rsync and use BBEdit to find all instances of my link code and then a do a quick rm-rf on all the directors that contain my link codes on my server.

[Bill]

Originally Posted by Cleo

Actually it is pretty easy for me. I keep a local copy of my server using rsync and use BBEdit to find all instances of my link code and then a do a quick rm-rf on all the directors that contain my link codes on my server.

do a brother a solid and write a tutorial on how to do that with co-location accounts. Do we have to install the rsynch client on our co-lo server or what?

I'm getting sick of manually updating freesites and pages with dead or untrustworthy sponsors. And I expect there will be many more sponsor deaths coming.

[SheepGuy]

What Red Cherry said

[Cleo]

Originally Posted by Bill

do a brother a solid and write a tutorial on how to do that with co-location accounts. Do we have to install the rsynch client on our co-lo server or what?

I'm a Mac user and Macs are unix just like our servers are. Rsync is a command line unix tool.

It basically it does FTP but it's really fast and can be used to sync two directories or two entire servers. In my case my server and a local copy of it on my hard drive. I've automated all of the this using a crontab on my Mac.

Nothing to install on your server, or on a Mac for that matter. Not sure what is available for Windows users.

This is what the rsync command looks like that a crontab on my Mac runs each night.

rsync -avCP --ignore-errors  --delete --exclude "analog/"  remoteuser@host:/remote/path /local/path/to/backup

To rsync it back,

rsync -avCP --ignore-errors  --delete --exclude "analog/" /local/path/to/backup remoteuser@host:/remote/path

But there is no need to use rsync at all. I use it because I prefer to work on a copy of my stuff instead of the original in case I mess up. Also because I prefer using Mac's visual tools like drag and drop and BBEdit.

You can also ssh into your server and use command line tools to do search and replace or delete.