Originally Posted by u-Bob

Shaving is, imo, not crediting the affiliate's account for sales he sent.

The hide join option (and similar options like hide rebills etc), the way I understand it, does not do that. It only affects the way statistics are displayed in the dashboard/backend.

Let's say you run a PPS program. Affiliates get credited for joins and not for rebills. In this case, there's no point in displaying the rebill stats to the affiliate. So the program owner would configure NATS to not display those rebill stats to the affiliate.
If I understood correctly, NATS won't allow the program owner to hide rebills if the program is set to pay on rebills.

The same applies to the hide join option. If the program is not paying on joins but only on rebills, NATS allows the program owner to hide the joins from his affiliates. If an affiliate program owner wants to offer this kind of deal to his affiliates ($0 on joins and 50% of rebills), he's free to do so. However, like I and a few others here said: I'd never promote a program like that. The problem here is that caribbean flavor cash misrepresented itself here.