grzepa

On their site i read on a revshare you get: "0% of Join AND50% of Rebills
50% Dialer" that explains your friends rebill

__________________
Like X-ART !!

Captain Kawaii

Damned Kids!

lazycash

Minusonebit is dancing in his grave.

__________________

lucas131

john, i dont think it is nonsense and troll party to ask question about really strange setting in your software. take it from possition as webmaster sending sales, and you dont even know about the sales. is that ok for you? to hide something? i know, it depends on program owner, but why do you even have that implemented? only helping to hide stats from webmasters, there is no other use for it ...

OneHungLo

Real life? No way.

Screwed Up

You beat me to it.
You are clueless!

__________________

looky_lou

This shit would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

Clueless program owner and a pompous TMM (nats) owner.

__________________

Oracle Porn

just a note caribbean lost me as an affiliate.
i've made my own conclusions, thanks lucas for this thread.

__________________

Klen

his name is radim not lucas

Klen

I dont see anything wrong what John says- nats indeed doesn't support shaving and those features are made for specific type programs and cant be done any other way.After all shaving means to not display certain number of sales,while in this case sales are not displayed at all.So i think more appropriate way for calling this would be blatant scam.Also when it comes to any kind of affiliate sales protecting,no script can do that perfectly since i can think of many ways how to fuck affiliate no matter what affiliate script is used.I would post them but i dont want to give ideas to program owners lol.

BaldBishop

John gave a satisfactory answer to the first questions. I think most of us understand why the hide_join option was added. There were however a couple extra interesting questions raised in this thread that deserve an answer as well. I hope John will answer them soon and I find it strange that he thinks people are trolling him. Affiliates are faced with nonpaying programs every day. Affiliates take on huge risks by promoting affiliate programs and it's perfectly reasonable for them to be asking questions. It's even perfectly understandable that some of them got loud when they learned NATS had a hide_join setting. You have to admit that the name of that option can cause confusion for those who are not familiar with the internal workings of NATS. In the current climate of nonpaying programs, it's really no surprise that people got suspicious when they read the first post about the hidden joins.

__________________

lucas131

still, it does not matter how you call it. and whatever it was implemented for, it can be used also to hide joins to affiliates. or what is the nice explanation for this function? i am really dumb, can someone tell me via email for example if you dont want to publish it? i am slow i know, but what i see i dont understand so dont like ... and i am really thankful for carib support and john answer, i just dont get them. i am not mad or something, just want to know ...

lucas131

no drama, respect to nats, no answer is needed, if nobody care, all must be well, just that it made me go hmmm ... have luck everyone!

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.

lucas131

and it is not possible to change program settings on the fly? or how do you know that every fifth minute nobody get paid for joins for example? every fifth minute, just put program to not pay joins and rebills and hide joins and rebills, and here we go! you can change program settings in ccbill without problem, not sure in nats, but it may be possible or not? the hide join option is not good, tell whatever you want, it is not good and ill option in nats ... if i made sale, i made sale, even if the percentage is 0, i made sale, if i dont see sale, something is wrong

Sly

This is absolutely correct.

Any of you that promote a PPS program running on NATS see the hide function in action as the rebills will be set to hidden.

__________________
Vacares - Web Hosting, Domains, O365, Security & More - Paxum and BTC Accepted

Windows VPS now available - 1st month free for GFY members - DM for details

Wanted: CCBill pay sites for sale

Klen

Well,i would suggest to resolve this problem how nats should list what settings each program have to avoid confusion.

lucas131

can you write anything on nats programs page? yes. can affiliate see real percantage ratio anywhere? no. can be joins and rebills hidden? yes. can i send joins to program and see nothing? yes. all this in nats basic settings ... dont understand that ... but correct me please, i hope i am wrong ...

signupdamnit

I agree. And it's not a new suggestion. I know I suggested the same thing over a year ago and I'm sure others did as well. In addition there needs to be a tamper resistant history of relevant changes kept and available for display by the affiliate.

MPA3 also could use this as could CCBill. From what I understand CCBill does not even send emails to affiliates anymore when sponsors change settings such as how many rebills count.

These things are so basic and have been suggested for so long that it isn't a stretch to suggest that they might be getting intentionally left out in order to help sponsors more easily defraud affiliates. It's a shame that affiliates haven't made more noise about this stuff (not just nats). I know I have tried over and over again. But without others also making noise nothing ever changes.

__________________

You don't like my posts? Put me on ignore or fuck right off. I'll say what I want.

MrCain

It's hard to see why an honest program owner would object to NATS and MPA implementing a feature that lets affiliates know when the program owner changes the payout settings for his program. I'd imagine an honest program owner would welcome this feature. It would expose his stealing competitors as crooks and drive more affiliates to his program.

__________________
Sigmund

nico-t

i guess that's why nats is so popular with program owners.

iSpyCams

Yep seems like a case of dumbassery. It also doesnt help that as well meaning as TMM support can be, I am sure John's focus as a sales guy is more on program owners than affiliates, and overall as a Nats licensee it seems they very often don't understand issues that are presented to them in layman's terms on the first try.

So their first round of explanations can sometimes be less helpful than they intend. It's not that they are trying to be obtuse, its just that it can be hard for coders and non coders to communicate clearly regarding code.

lucas131

i still havent received any explanation for what is that hide join option there? i am not allowed to know? or is shave the right word? i just want to know as affiliate who is sending traffic to many nats based programs, hope it is not something forbidden to know ... otherwise, i still see the hide joins just to shave, nothing else. if you show join with 0 usd, like hazecash for example, all is ok, cash is there in few hours after anti fraud checking, but hide joins? what the fucking fuck! and great to see that really almost nobody care, sheeps? excuse me

iSpyCams

TMM John tried to explain it. There other types of programs besides the revshare and PPS programs that seem to comprise about 99% of what we see. Additionally there are PPC, PPL and Pay Per Active programs that do not pay anything on a join, but rather on click or on an email submit or on conversion of a trial join. This option is intended for those kinds of programs.

If you are not being paid for a join, it is essentially none of your business how many there are. Sure it would be helpful to know, but if the program doesn't want to tell you, you cant make them, and Nats does not force them to UNLESS they are paying per join.

For a PPC program, you don't always want your affiliates to know what percentage of their clicks are turning into joins, because they may use that information to filter out higher quality traffic and send it to a PPS program and only send the crap to PPC.

It's the same reason PPS programs often hide rebills. If you find your more targetted members are retaining for years, you may switch that traffic to revshare and leave only the less retaining traffic on PPS.

I still think this one program in question was being sneaky by doing this, I am guessing they have been raped by scammy chat traffic from the Philipines and made that program to discourage and de-incentivise fake signups. They should have redesigned their programs payouts before launching it to honest webmasters.

lucas131

yes, so maybe time to put some restriction to use that option only for some programs? otherwise, it is still shave on revs, do not tell me that it is not. the easiest way of shaving in nats, or am i still wrong? i understand hide rebills on pps, you dont need to know about rebills if you are paid per signup, but if you are on revs, it is not good to have it allowed on revs ... honest webmasters, who want to split revenue, may be very easily ripped off ...

lucas131

you can write on public programs page whatever you want, for example we pay 50% from joins and 50% from rebills, but rebills may be setup for 0%, there is no way for affiliate to find out the real percentage, and here we go, no rebills on revs for anyone ... or am i still wrong?

signupdamnit

I don't feel that the scenario I described earlier (turning on and off various options either manually or automatically as a way to shave) has been shown to not be viable. No one has actually tried it and reported whether or not it can actually be done and I'm not sure that TMM_John understood me at the time when he said it was not a risk. From his attitude I'm not sure that he would tell me if it were.

I don't understand why TMM would not put in a tamper resistant program settings section with all these settings and the history for each available for affiliates to see. I don't see what the problem is. It seems like a good idea but somehow the suggestion always gets ignored or dismissed.

It's really starting to seem to me that many people in adult are basically dicks and don't give a shit. You ask a couple questions and make suggestions and you are treated like shit. Between being talked down to by TMM John and having an entire topic removed by Mansion Productions just for bring up historical events with their old shaving module in MPA2 I don't know which is worse.

__________________

You don't like my posts? Put me on ignore or fuck right off. I'll say what I want.

iSpyCams

If you want I can test it later today. My prediction is that it will cause a huge mess. Easily detectable by anyone who is paying attention.

MrCain

I'm interested to hear John's answer to the questions about what happens if a sponsor changes the settings for an existing program. Affiliates, honest sponsors and TMM can only benefit if more people gain a better understanding of how NATS defends itself against that kind of tampering.

__________________
Sigmund

signupdamnit

When you have financial related software such as NATS which is responsible for tracking millions of dollars a month it is vital that possible issues and severe bugs are addressed in a timely and reasonable manner. Summarily dismissing the people who use your software and bring up potential issues as "trolls" isn't exactly a positive quality.

__________________

You don't like my posts? Put me on ignore or fuck right off. I'll say what I want.

signupdamnit

Thanks I would appreciate that. It seems to me that it is quite possible that it was coded so that it would ignore those sales when the hide options were on along with the retro active option because it would be seen as a feature. If you didn't do it this way then in a scenario where you had an affiliate previously on PPS but who was switched over to revshare it would then presumably show a bunch of $0 rebill transactions. Presumably existing rebills (from when the affiliate was on PPS) would show up as $0 rebills (which the affiliate was already paid for on a PPS basis) in future months after the affiliate was switched over to PPS possibly causing confusion. So it could be seen as a "feature" to do it in the way which is vulnerable to being used as a sort of shave module. It becomes an unintended (hopefully) consequence of the way the application was coded with the retro active option and the hide joins and hide rebills options together providing the capability to shave and hide evidence of it from the affiliate.

Here is an alternate way to explain the scenario.

1. Retro active option ON, hide joins off, hide rebills ON, PPS, Sales $35, Rebills $0
2. Affiliate makes ten sales in month 1.
3. Affiliate switches to revshare at end of month 1. Retro active ON, hide joins off, hide rebills off, Sales 50%, Rebills 50%

At this point unless coded in the way I describe during month 2 presumably the affiliate will start to see a bunch of $0 rebills for which he has already been paid on a PPS basis. This is where it might be considered a "legitimate feature" to tie the hide joins and hide rebills settings retroactively.

But if you don't see this then it means presumably that it could be used to shave because the old settings are used despite the settings being changed.

Shaving scenario:

1. Noon- Retro active option ON, hide joins ON, hide rebills ON, Revshare, Sales 0%, Rebills 0%
2. 1pm - Affiliate makes three sales.
3. 2pm- Sponsor switches back to Retro active option ON, hide joins OFF, hide rebills OFF, Revshare, Sales 50%, Rebills 50%

Nothing presumably would be shown in the stats for those joins or future rebills presuming it was coded in the way described above to hide them retroactively based on the settings existing at the time.

I hope this helps you test it.

__________________

You don't like my posts? Put me on ignore or fuck right off. I'll say what I want.

iSpyCams

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.

iSpyCams

Basically this means this could be a shave method, but I still maintain that it is a clumsy one since all an affiliate has to do is visit http://program_name.com/external.php?page=programs to see the payout set for all programs.

Most likely a script could be created by one of our watchdogs such as Mr Deiz to detect and report changes on those pages, if one does not already exist.

EriktheRabbit

Silence and shady modules not a good thing. If a program does not require the module then it should not be delivered to them. This is 2012, not 1997.

if a program has trouble with shady traffic, block the traffic and or do not sign up webmasters/customers from those problematic geo spots. problem solved.

iSpyCams

The ability to change payouts is not a module its an function, an option that is needed for almost every special PPS promo out there.

And its been part of nats for a very long time, so every nats program out there already has it.

TMM_John

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.

__________________

Skype: JohnA1078
Too Much Media - Makers of the Industry's Leading Payite Management Platform, NATS!

signupdamnit

Yes this is exactly what I was wondering. Whether the "hide joins" and "hide rebills" option were also "sticky" (based on the settings at the time of the member join) when Retro Active payouts is set to on.

If the NATS can be set to shave within the program itself then it should be fixed though so that it is no longer possible to do without the affiliate noticing. That would be the ethical thing to do and I think it's what affiliates expect.

I hope you guys will be running your own tests to check to make sure things are working as they were intended to work.

__________________

You don't like my posts? Put me on ignore or fuck right off. I'll say what I want.

signupdamnit

pompousjohn, I greatly appreciate you taking the time to do this and for having the integrity to come back and report results like this.

Yes the next step would be to change it back to:

Retro Active ON (should already be on), pay 50% of joins and 50% of rebills, hide joins OFF, hide rebills OFF

and then to see if those three joins made at the time when the other settings were present end up showing up in affiliate stats at all. Also to check the same for any trial conversions or rebills.

From what TMM_John states and what I understand they should show up in the affiliate stats after doing this because "hide joins" and "hide rebills" are not "sticky" (based on the settings at the time of the initial join). If they do not then this shows that the method likely can be used to "Shave".

__________________

You don't like my posts? Put me on ignore or fuck right off. I'll say what I want.

lucas131

the external.php?page=programs can be changed to anything, there is no real percentage anywhere, you can post there naked babes or redirect to youtube, so you can check it million times but the actual percentage and truth may be somewhere else

signupdamnit

But the issue with "?page=programs" is that I believe it only shows current settings and it does not keep track of past changes (this would probably be a good feature request!). So you'd have to catch them in the act. Sure you could build a watchdog but then again they might provide for some sort of counter for that such as not letting the page load (perhaps via .htaccess or firewall settings) when the shave is on.

To be fair to NATS CCBILL doesn't show history for many settings either and I've never received an email when they rebill settings were changed by a sponsor. Also I don't believe MPA3 does this either. I may be wrong on one of these.

__________________

You don't like my posts? Put me on ignore or fuck right off. I'll say what I want.

lucas131

and thank you people for the posting in this thread, it is nice cause my english is not enough to understand or explain what this or that means nice to see at least some people care!

PAR

The flaw in what everyone is saying is that most owners know nats (or has a tech that does know it inside and out) These owners also send traffic to other nats programs..
So if they had a "shave function" do you think it would take a noob to find it?
and then out it...

TMM_John

You say that as if I've ever said anything different.

__________________

Skype: JohnA1078
Too Much Media - Makers of the Industry's Leading Payite Management Platform, NATS!

iSpyCams

OK done, the missing joins did show up, with zero payout as expected. So this pokes a huge hole in the "nats as a shaving tool" theory because shaved sales would show up as a zero dollar join as soon as the payout changes were corrected.

signupdamnit

To be fair to TMM/NATS there are legitimate reasons to have the "Hide Joins", "Hide Rebills", and "retro active payout" options. Also with the theoretical attack (shave method) I described there is a legitimate reason to hide the joins and rebills under those circumstances in that you might not want a bunch of $0 rebills to show up say after a affiliate was switched from PPS to revshare. So even if the method can be used to shave undetected (not proven yet, I merely present it as possibility) it does not necessarily mean that TMM intentionally built in a "shave module". A more accurate description would be that it is an unintended bug. Hopefully one which will be fixed if present.

Now if they knew it was there or learned of it's presence and did nothing then there is a case for saying TMM is helping to support the shaving of affiliates. But we aren't there yet IMHO...

__________________

You don't like my posts? Put me on ignore or fuck right off. I'll say what I want.

lucas131

ok thank you for the findings! so only if the program is setup from the beginning it is possible to shave, not on the run. so, that is good to know, still you can shave random users full, just by giving them shave turned on program

iSpyCams

If anything I would say Nats did go out of its way to make the software transparent to affiliates and make it very difficult to rip affiliates off, I would say impossible but we all know that where there's a will there's a way.

I would say the software functions as advertised and I have no doubt anyone trying to shave with it would get zero support through official channels.

TMM_John

And, it's been shown to not be the case as I said a number of times. Now, when people come here, read half of the thread and wrongly take away the conclusion that people were stating that there is now an uncovered shave method in NATS it harms our company and the NATS brand.

__________________

Skype: JohnA1078
Too Much Media - Makers of the Industry's Leading Payite Management Platform, NATS!

lucas131

you know, the problem is still there. if there was no refund on my carib account and no rebill on my friends carib account, i will be thinking that i am sending no sales and ratio is just horrible, and they have been cashing on my traffic. if they, newbies as it looks like they are, can do it, then everyone can and now, if you can even hide rebills, you will just think that there are no sales, and on programs page may be written 50/50 ...

iSpyCams

I think we have a different idea of shaving. What you encountered with that long-ass named program was more like "fuck you we don't pay for joins" in real small letters at the bottom of the page. Shaving would be if you made 10 sales and they hid 5 of them from you.