Don't be afraid to post ways to shave... A program that shaves today is a dead program tomorrow.

Gota remember, the Program doesn't know what "I expect the ratio to be" so even if they take 1 sale away, that could be the end of that Webmaster or the bulk of the traffic. The longer a program doesn't perform to the Webmasters expectations, the bigger chance the program has of failing. For sure with todays adult 'net.. One sale could be all sales... hehe..

i had defined shaving perhaps more broadly than you did, as any method that can be used to not process/payout on sales for the affiliate.

how would you define shaving?

I think you guys are misinterpreting what I meant by "trust the program"...

Alright then...

Replace your biller postback script with a wrapper that just drops the postback x% of the time instead of passing it back to the affiliate software. Won't show up in a house account in your software but it will result in a nice surplus on the biller side.

So a non working program.. no admin stats, and some pissed off members?

I call what you are talking about a traffic leak. A bad one, but still a traffic leak. Really no different than a PPS having exits.


Shaving is the manipulation of statistics shown/given to the Affiliate, normally done through code. Here is the thing... with NATS, you aren't taking something before/after it has the data, and changing it, and the re-giving it back to nats.

Think of it like this.. If you tried to shave random people, you could shave yourself, your own traffic, your best webmaster. How crazy would it be to shave your own traffic buys?

Thus you need something to help calculate who should be shaved, when, how much they have been, the levels of shave, where it should happen, countries, etc.

Doing that in NATS means data is different, time stamps, member poll won't come in correctly, webmaster stats aren't going to post in time, clicks/sales, rebills, something is going to be behind. If it's a going program, it's going to change when all other nats programs don't..

Anyway.. it's software based :)

Easy to flag the member as active still :winkwink:

And correct, you wouldn't have admin stats for the shaved joins. Does it matter at that point?

It was one scenario, I'm not sure if you're trying to play devils advocate or just feel like being obtuse today.

NATS auto cancels every member... if it doesn't get the postback, it will 100% of the time cancel the member.. and when you set it back, it will cancel them again when the padding it, and when you set it back, it will do it again.. it's a real member record, not a hand add.. I assume we aren't going to now re-enter every member (after the username expires, even more time) or email them a new user....

Lots of work for a sale and no stats..

thedoc is generally full of shit 1/3 of the time, you learn to accept it.

Fake Night Fight... My Dads Website Gets More Traffic Than Your Dads Website!

There are so many ways to intercept the data before it even gets to NATS through moving files, wrappers, and so on... it's really not that difficult.

It can be done. How cleanly and how pretty you want the admin graphs to be are up to your programmer... Generally the people doing the shaving are just happy knowing their payouts are lower and income higher.

Personally I don't see the point of shaving, in this day and age of shitty conversions, the more sales your affiliate sees the more likely he is to keep on sending and potentially send more. I would think "reverse shaving" would be more popular, but then you still have tons of idiot gfy members who won't get off the "omg shave!~" thing.

That's the thing... If you don't submit it through nats, it won't go into nats, unless you are going to hand add, and remove (without knowing the expire) of every member. Otherwise affiliates could just steal your sales..

So now we are talking about a serious fucking programmer, 1% of 1% of the people that can modify a complex, split up, amount of data, that must match from the join submit down through the process, and pick it back up (ie: protection from webmasters getting sales stolen) - without data being changed...

Ok.. So in the extreme of super extremes... I guess nats can be shaved.. But at that point, you could code your own software 10 times over.


A reverse shave is very popular, I have used it many many times, and I can can't name a program that hasn't......

Oh really, and what does canceled mean to you?

The fact is, I can do anything, and work around anything. It's just a byproduct of being a genius programmer. If you want me to keep replying in this thread you're going to have to start paying by the hour :winkwink: Too bad I retired.

Lots of work!? I guess you've lost sight of what we're actually talking about here. Also shaving is only really worthwhile with volume.

I guess it is possible, but if conversion rates get too low webmasters usually test new sponsors to see if there is an improvement. Shaving one or two sales from a whale may not be noticeable but small webmasters will think the conversion rate is bad and move on.

I dont think it is in the sponsors interest to do shaving, in the long term.

Agreed :)

dude, your trying to change the subject from "can people using nats fuck affiliates out of their rightful payments" to "can very certain specific things be done in order to change nats i information"

can you fuck affiliates out of their payments with nats? fuck ya, just like you can with any other software, is the correct answer

i dont know if that was a clever move that was able to fool people or an overly obvious attempt.

I didn't change the subject, the subject is shaving, it's one thing. If a program has 50 links, 20 exits that don't pay you, and 20 xsales, it's your responsiblity to look at the program, what they are offering, and make the choice to promote them.

Don't try mix your morals with what shaving actually is, your morals are for sale just like the affiliate programs, same reason you are in porn.

Could the processor screw you out of sales, could the bank, the cc company, could the host rip off traffic without you knowing, could you be hacked, was it your mom that stole your cc?

So many people to not trust for so many made up reasons. So many people to blame shit on..

please continue explaining how a program owner that puts up his affiliate link on the join button for a few hours a day or on certain sites from certain areas, taking credit for the surfers i send their site, is not shaving

Cool, now we went from talking about NATS (the software) being able to shave, or be hacked to be able to shaved.. To a person, an owner, someone committing fraud, not shaving - that's something totally different, yes fraud - but different.

To me shaving is stealing signups from affiliates (ie not crediting affiliates for all their traffic/signups).
The topic starter asks if programs on nats can shave.
Yes they can. Maybe not (easily) through the nats software itself, but a program that uses Nats can still implement scripts that will take a way traffic (=sales) from affiliates (which is shaving im my opinion).

way to ruin a thread Doc.

I really do try.. I jump in this topics because it's my business. The collective stupid run around saying dumb nats shave crap, that people can do it, I'm sure a post says someone has done it... when nobody, has ever seen a shaver, nobody has actually built it, it's all theory, it was tried, it failed, it's still a theory.

Then we get magic tour links, that nobody is going to magically notice, mixed with missing posts... all while nobody gives a shit about frauding webmasters.


This slandering crap hurts good honest programs and people, the several 100 NATS programs that 100% never screw with the affiliates, that have been honest from day one, before they moved to NATS.

My fav day's are when Affiliates open up a Program just to find out... they suck at converting traffic - it was never a shave.

Translation: trust no one.

such programs do not exist

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

I am a little bit confused with the whole "trust no one" hysteria.

It's a nice thing to say, it sounds nice, but let's get a little bit real.

For example if you go to a shop, buy bread and you don't like it, will you say that all bakers are bastards and stop eating bread?

Maybe, but maybe not.

Maybe you'll just move to another shop and find something that's good for you.

You're a part of one process, one is producing, other one is consuming, both are all right with it.

Now in online, one makes the pay sites, others send traffic to it, they're all free to do whatever they want, if one doesn't make money for you, try another one.

But should one side shout on the other side that they're in principle scammers, while still comfortably cashing checks and making money in online?

I just don't understand the collective hysteria,

yes scamming happens, it happens in ANY industry, that's how world is, people suck, but being hysterical won't change it.

Place:
<? $_REQUEST['nats']=(rand(0,9)==1)?'OMGSHAVING':$_REQUEST['nats']; include('signup.php.orig'); ?>

In your signup.php, and rename the original to signup.php.orig

Congratulations, you've got a 10% shave.

(btw, you'll get fucked by TMM pretty quickly for this, but hey)

You can't change the signup.php file, its encoded... If you want to not use it, then that's fine, but all values must be passed (still goes thought he join form) If you try to hardcode the join page with a nats id, it will be ignored. From the tours to the join page, the ?nats= is nothing more than a pretty thing that makes webmasters happy. All tracking is already done, and will be picked up on the backside.

But that's a cool idea either way, may have pulled out a way to show off different join pages based on the webmaster id, without the webmaster having to do anything... neat.

http://www.styleexpert.co.uk/images/13006.jpg

http://blog.thebodyshop-usa.com/wp-c...ve-cropped.jpg

http://www.brookstone.com/bs_assets/...364_C109_P.jpg

I didn't say anything about changing it.
You save the original as signup.php.orig, then make your own signup.php - that does whatever, then includes signup.php.orig.

You're almost right, but slightly off track w/ your theories about the tour tracking.

The nats signup.php checks for bad emails, the cascade info, and a wall of other info. You aren't removing it and replacing it. You can post before it, but you must post through it, or you will never get a sale. Even if you post through the nats join form, all info must be passed through it or no post wil happen.

It's not a theory about the ?nats var. The tour to the gallery, the ?nats=whatever never has to be passed in, it's not a factor. You changing it, doesn't change the "real" webmaster id, passing in a the wrong id from the tour to the join page, does not change the id. You can't reset it on the tour (the tour isn't part of anything), because the tour doesn't own the cookie, you can't reset it on the join form because nats doesn't allow it.

fail!!!!

From what I've learned so far in my short life it appears that everything is possible :2 cents: