Quote:
Originally Posted by pompousjohn
OK I have started the test. Initial findings are not encouraging. The retroactive switch does not affect affiliate earnings that have already been reported as far as I can tell, which makes a lot of sense but also would help to hide sneaky program changes.
I have some screen grabs but I don't know what the point is to post them unless somebody starts calling me a liar.
The program I used was a disabled program of which my own personal affiliate account was the only active member. Program was set to payout 50% of joins and 50% of rebills.
I switched it to hide joins, hide rebills and pay 0% of joins and 0% of rebills. I also set the program to Retro-Active Payout.
I refreshed stats from affiliate and admin side to see if there was any effect on existing sales and rebills, there was none.
Then I did 3 signups with a test credit card # provided by Netbilling.
On the admin side I could see the joins, on the affiliate side I could not detect any change at all, apart from one additional unique.
I guess the next step is to change it back and see if the joins and rebills show, unfortunately this program has a 7-day trial membership so those could be a long time coming.
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You changed the program to be a $0 payout program, so there was no payout for those joins. Just like if you changed it from $50 per join to $40 per join, joins done after the change will be paid at $40 per join.
I think the missing piece of explanation for signupdamnit might be that the "hide" settings are not saved with each join. The system doesn't know if "hide" was enabled or disabled when a join happened, it only knows what it is set to when displaying stats.
Therefore, the part of your test that you left out, switching it back on (which is what I believe signupdamnit was asking about), will then show the affiliate the $0 joins.
If you change a program to $0 payout, you change a program to $0 payout. I think the question here is whether or not there is an ability to "hide" joins that only happen when the program is temporarily set to $0 and hide is temporarily enabled (which I could understand being a problem if it were the case). This is not an issue, becuase once hide is turned back off, joins that occurred, regardless of their payout and regardless of what hide was set to when they happened will show.
To make a broader statement, I've always maintained that you can manipulate any stats system in some way to wrongfully credit affiliates (it does not matter if it's NATS, CCBill, MPA, custom, etc.) If someone is THAT determined to rip off affiliates, they'll find a way. The stance I have always taken is that we will not build a feature with the direct intent of doing so into NATS, and if we find that someone is abusing the system in some way to manipulate the numbers it shows, we will take action against that program (as we have done in the past).
edit: Just to also be clear, this is my understanding of how the system functions. Of course, if we find otherwise, we'd take steps to properly correct any issues.