Help Build NATS v4: Broken Link Codes...
 

We want to ask everyone for feedback on something we are enhancing on NATS v4: broken link code handling.

Lets say you are placing a link to a NATS program on your page (encoded or unencoded link codes) and you mess up the link so that the program ID or tour ID, etc. is wrong.

What would you like to happen?

a) display an error message right away when the broken link is clicked. This will make the fact that it is broken very obvious but will also not allow any traffic to flow through until the link is repaired.

or

b) attempt to fix the link. for instance if you accidentally try to send to program id 51 instead of 5, we would recognize that program id 51 is invalid for the site or program you are trying to send to and grab the first program we can find that is valid for you and the site you are sending to and pass the surfer along to that program. This will allow the link to work but may make it very unnoticeable to you for fixing.

We are also toying with the idea of going with option b) and notifying you within the new affiliate area that a link had to be repaired and what URL that link came from.

Thanks for the feedback!

Create an error log maybe, otherwise just correct the broken program/siteid's and move forward with it.

Admin side and user side error reporting imo would be cool.
Webmaster can see when he logs in, in his homepage control panel (as seen in nats v4 preview) that he has errors in some of his campaigns (if it's possible to attribute it to webmaster)
Admin would see all of them, and by referrers, you could show him matching resellers who sent traffic from same domains, then an account manager can let reseller know (sure some will choose not to) that there is a problem with a linking code.

i think fixing a link is not a bad idea, but to make it perfect you'll have to waste resource, which MAY dramatically reflect on the whole db usage, in order to help a few idiots who fucked up their own links :D which I think happens rather rarely...

imho best thing to do, code wise, is to alert the affiliate with a list of URLs the broken links are coming from (both in the admin and via email, otherwise you're risking the affiliate to miss the message because of spam filters). and instead of wasting the traffic, just put a some text saying the page wasn't found and a link with history.back() saying "go back to the page you came from" or something similar

you can also put an additional link with the default site the webmasters signed up with, thats if you can identify the webmaster id, but again, there's the risk of sending a straight surfer to a gay page :D not big, but it's possible...

good luck with it!