cleaning outgoing traffic to sponsors - methods?
 

With all this talk about sponsors terminating affiliate accounts for mis-use of free content I figured it was time for a talk about washing outgoing clicks so the sponsors don't get any referring URL data.

I've always used a meta-refresh redirect when using my own tours and linking to the sponsors join page so they can't see my tour and use/steal my ideas.

However this would require changing links for most people and put gallery & freesite submitters back at square one with the risk of getting blacklisted by TGP & LL owners for changing sites after they were submitted.

Are there any solutions at the server level to strip referring url's from outgoing links without having to change the code on the sites themselves?

Be careful not to violate your Sponsor's TOS by doing this though, if I recall correctly, GammaEnt & all the old Click-thru-calvin programs had specific statements in their TOS agreements that strictly forbid any deliberate stripping of referrer data.

You should be in the clear with most sponsors nowadays though, I haven't seen any similar clauses recently.

replied to your own question?

LOL you OWNED yourself!!


L$

:error :helpme :error

That was towards the people thinking of doing this, I would have added it to the original post but missed the edit time limit.

Could be done with htaccess and PHP (+SQL) maybe..?

But why go through all that hassle?
Most other ways of being either compliant or non-compliant should be easier & safer.

It doesn't really have much to do with compliance.

Look at the NATS exploit... an affiliate works hard to find the absolute best way to sell that particular site, 5 minutes later the whole webmaster community has copied you word for word.

I'm not comfortable with a sponsor seeing ALL my traffic sources.