[cowox]

MR Harry care about this animal

[hasseily]

Wayne:

You're saying that an affiliate cannot get tangible proof of damages from parasites.

That is not entirely true.
I can give you a whole distribution of all BHO parasites for all my user sessions lately.

From there I can relatively accurately calculate damages.

And believe me, it isn't chump change.

Henri Asseily
CTO, BizRate.com

[obstinatedon]

Good Henri, provided you can do so definitively - rather than relatively.

Relativity (not Einstein's E=MC2) will not hold up in court without substantial evidence as corroboration.

Speaking of theories, I am still interested in yours as it pertains to the demise of the networks in favor of the PPC model.

Obstinatedon

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

Mahatma Gandhi

[mdwolinski]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by BLFH:
Now I could. And they do operate by altering the cookie on the end users computer. They stated that if something on the end users computer was changed, then a new hacking law in this state (at least) may very well apply also.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

This isn't "technically" true as far as eBates is concerned. I spent a good part of today looking at how eBates operates.

I had originally thought that eBates operated as a BHO (Browsing Helper O-somethign or another), if that were the case, then disabling that aspect of IE would stop the activity, which it didn't.

I did know that it runs it's own application, which can't be killed because it restarts itself. From running those applications someone mentioned in this thread or another thread, here's what I know.

User goes to a site. MMM notices that, after the page loads (here's why I thought it was a BHO, because BHO's are triggered by a load complete signal from the browser), MMM sends a page to the browser, which includes the eBates link for the affiliate. It pulls this page off it's website.

That page either creates the frame or does the IE6 popup about a lack of frame and reloads the website with eBates affiliate code.

LinkShare (or CJ) and Merchant website sees new affiliate code and sends out a new cookie for it. So it's not eBates which is technically changing the cookie. It's just noticing a lack of it's affiliate code in the initial link to the site and resending the site.

There are several ways to beat it, but that takes consumer education. Ad-Aware of course to delete the program all together. Stop using IE and start using Mozilla (which MMM doesn't work with, many parasites don't work with it actually).

On the merchant side, a short term exclusive cookie as well, whereas the initial affiliate cookie won't be overwritten for said period of time.

Or you get merchants to drop eBates, et al.

Mark Wolinski
Affiliate Relations
GigaGolf, Inc

[womanht]

I propose that all webmaster, whether we post or lurk at these boards go through http://www.ebates.com/all_stores.go
and email our merchants telling them what ebates is doing and why we are going to their parasite free competitors.

Only when the merchants see a mass exodus of affiliates, and see their sales plumet will they wake up and kick out ebates.

Also, if we could get the merchants to band together to pressure CJ and affiliate networks to kick out the parasites, that would really help. CJ does not bother with us little affiliates, but the merchants are a different matter. They have the power to pressure CJ to kick out the parasites.

We are all webmasters here.

I propose that each of us writes an article about these parasites, how they impact the merchants' bottom line and puts it up with prominent links from the pages with our highest traffic. You could put a link to your article on your video reviews index page or whatever your site is best known for.

That way, merchants searching for super affiliates would stumble on our articles and see how this could affect them in the long run. They would take notice if they see these articles start popping up all over the net, on high traffic pages.

We could also write articles to warn fellow affiliates about parasite ware with links to lists of merchants using each of the parasite ware.

Anyone for this?