Wow..now I'm starting to wonder if that's the same reason why rebills have been shitty with some of my sponsors using NATS. :( :helpme

Where all your data dumps added properly?

I knew I was missing the silver lining

Hope both parties can resolve this :(

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh

So does either team have an idea of what is causing the problem?

Correct me if I am wrong but it doesn't sound like J&A are saying that Nats is doing this intentionally. It looks like they wanted this corrected and have been having a hard time getting what they want done.

Time will tell.

This major problem was presented to them. Never fixed, although they claimed full intergration with EC.

Nats was the best on market at a certain time. but executivestats looks pretty good considering you can get the full source and add what you want when needed.

Lots of people here getting sig spots

This is what I thought.....did they ignore the request or just have problems getting it done?

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh

Dude that's just wrong

Pathetic is whee somebody interjects their 2 cents without paying attention to all the facts which have been posted.

Your not wrong.

But you cant let affiliates use software you know is stealing their money. Not only is it unethical but as he already pointed out , it creates TWICE the work having to hand verify each affiliates rebills.

why spend thousands of dollars creating your own program when there is supposed to be a superior product on the market already? That's like building your own car from the ground up when you can go buy a Lamborghini.

Legally speaking, I can only speak fact, and that I cannot answer without talking to our attorney.

If you think that any program is shaveproof, you have absolutely no grasp of how programming works. NATS doesn't even have to have control over it, you can implement a shaving feature on your server before nats even gets involved I'm told.

John is a nice guy and so far I've only heard good things about NATS
The only feature I would add for sure is a FORCE to show first page uniques and raws with all programs, including realitycash.
Just being shown 2nd page uniques doesn't give it for me. That's the only critic i can give to the nats crew... and this is a positive meant one :D

I agree.

I am looking for a solution for the exact point you make...to automate and take away hand work.

It looks like they were finally made aware of the problem and looked for it to be fixed. That is what I don't understand. Why won't nats fix the problem if it hurts affils?

yes this is true. Without being on the sponsors servers theres no way to tell.

RealityCash for example was "missing" data on one of its servers for FHG's , as a result when surfers clicked the fhg's they were sent to adult.com's 10dollarcash program and the hits werent tracked at all with NATS. Zero ZIp NADA . you never made a cent nor a click. Isolated small example , but this could be done on purpose in a rotational method so as not to be caught, and nobody would ever know.

amazing that this all could have been avoided if NATS had used a little tact in the previous JSA thread and avoided trying to save face by suggesting that NATS kicked JSA out...you put your big balls on the table, your going to risk them gettting cut off

im pretty sure OCCASH is using NATS and showing RAW first page hits. Or at least UNIQUE first page hits.

Infact when realitycash first started they were showing First page hits , then they changed it.

Are you able to custom add features like this as a Nats client? Will they code this at your expense? Sounds like a small faeture that would help and I want to make my future affils happy.

This aways sucks... for us the the sponsored ones :Oh crap

I understand

As always, there are many sides to every story.

It's nice to see Chris laying out his side here, and I certainly hope he has given considerable thought to his posts before posting, and is absolutely positive that his information is correct.

Any program can shave if they want to just like smokey said there are tons of ways to do it.

We are not accusing NATS of intentionally shaving so lets get that clear.
We are simply stating back to original statement that tracking issues were an issue for us among a few other things. There was not a fix for this so we had to switch to another check processor. I have nothing bad either to say about the other check processor, we just wanted to use EC as our primary for check processing.

If a company says they support a specific biller then they should honor that and not just have it up on their site and when you are live find out they really don't. It sucks to have to make a business decision based on software restrictions.

Again from my point of view it sounds like neither firm was or is interested in hurting affiliates. What it looks like is that there is a glitch in the software that needs to be worked out. The question is why is it happening?

It is perfect. Prove me wrong. You can't.

SPACASH has a quite nice setup for stats, very detailed..

Broken down country by country , by raw first page , second page , join page etc evrything you need.

Looks like there is money to be made in porn, just not as a affiliate code monkey.

Is this a custom solution?

I seriously doubt Chris / J&A would just impulsively post this information. There is a reason for it, these guys are solid.

Well, to be honest I have just recently started promoting programs that use NATS, and I love the system (especially the campaign tracking), but I never understood how it could be "shave proof"

Well I am going out to the pool to do some work.

I will be back to check on the threads progress. Some very informative stuff in here.

I may be wrong but Nats has been around roughly the same amount of time that MPA2 was when problems starting going public with them. Right? I'm no expert but that makes perfect sense. MPA2 was the ultimate program. Everybody loved it. Then after 6 to 10 months bugs start happening and everybody goes fuckin nuts. Now nats has been around for about that time and I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing more and more Nats problems pop up.


Here are a few of the problems.
#1 if you want to shave you are going to shave. Anybody who thinks otherwise is a complete noob. If a program wants to shave they'll dish out the bucks and make damn sure they are shaving. You can blame MPA2 all you want for including that feature. Yes I agree it was wrong to make it SO easy to shave. But think about this, if they included it is because there was a DEMAND for it. They made a bad business decision to include it however webmasters are making an even worse business decision by DEMANDING and USING shave functions.

#2 The more features an affiliate software program has the more problems you are looking at. I'm a stats freak. In an ideal world I'd be able to get every stat I could possibly imagine. Unfortunately that doesn't work well in our industry. Sure it's nice to know all your stats and log and track every single thing. However that puts a huge load on your server and greatly increases your chances for disaster. The majority of issues that have come up with other affiliate software programs have been server issues, database issues, mysql issues, corrupt data issues. All the issues seemed to have one thing in common the program was trying to do too much. That is why we decided to use a program that basically tracks only what i need. Hits and Sales and I keep my password management 100% seperate from our affiliate program.

#3 If a program like Nats and Mpa2 is popular and sells well then the company gets bogged down on orders and can't dedicate enough time to you and your problems. I spoke with Oystein about this. They didn't expect the growth they had and as a result they quickly wound up understaffed. That is a tough position to be in. That is why it isn't always best to go with the most popular affiliate software. It's important to go with a company that:
- provides a solid software that will do the job.
- has the man power to do custom work for you and take care of your custom needs in a timely manner.
- has the man power to take care of all your problems in a timely manner.

You have to remember these programs are built to be sold to the masses. Personally I always have custom requests for my programs. Any company that can't respond to that won't get my business.

I dont think anyone is insinuating NATS is doing anything intentionally or that they would help anyone do anything like this.

The problem is if your affiliates arent getting paid , they will move on to more lucrative sponsors.

Unless a sponsor is on the ball they arent going to notice , because glitches like this mean the sponsor gets MORE money and the affiliates LESS, so everything appears better until your affiliate base starts leaving for better ratio's.

If the problem isn't addressed what else can you do really but switch software.

interresting..

I had a similar problem too, but it was with wts bank. Actually nats wasnt reporting that they were cancelled or bounced checks so I paid out on about 270 checks. This seems like something as simple as a post back error. Shaving? no.. Its just a miscomunication of the back ends. That can actually be retro imported pretty easially. im almost certain of that. In all honesty, this is something that you should have caught sooner and mentioned it to nathan. I caught my postback problem within a few days and it was fixed in a few minutes.
Duke

I hate to quote such a long speil , but i couldnt pick any one part to comment on , it was all good :)

:thumbsup :thumbsup great post

Very good point :thumbsup

It was mentioned MONTHS ago and still wasn't fixed. Did someone from NATS have you say that?

Chris, I can do many things, and nothing is ever perfect.

I need my sig space in this thread...

I need 2 cents

Jon

yes... i kwno
to me it seems as if programs can choose how to display the numbers...
I would prefer them being forced to show first page hits and 2nd page.
They can display the conversion rates how they want to (even based on 2nd page hits).
I just wanna see first page raw and unique for myself...
thats what I meant

drama drama drama

What makes you think we didn't point it out? We would be ignorant to have not pointed it out.

Not having to do with nats, but just ask yourself how many program owners besides Alex and Jason would spend the time to manually credit these sales. I can tell you very few.

It was a pure Rsync problem. Wasn't done on purpose.

100 errors.. :Oh crap