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morphine
TR Staff
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TR link-auto-affiliate script

Tue Jul 30, 2013 6:01 pm

Enhancing shareholder value

TL;DR: links to products in certain online stores will be invisibly auto-affiliated for TR and you won't notice anything amiss.


Full scoop:

Hello fellow gerbils and gerbilettes!

For many years, referral advertising has been a boon both for online stores (Newegg, Amazon, etc), and for any website that links to them. That is, a site like us links to, say, an Amazon product, with a special tag. If Amazon gets a sale, the site gets a cut. Has been that way for a long time.

TR is no stranger to that practice, having established several partnerships over the years, most prominently but not only with Newegg. However, linking specific products is always a pain-in-the-backside repetitive work, and doing that in the forums is pretty much impossible since we can't spend our day editing everyone's post to add referral links.

So given that we heard that these things called "computers" are just frickin' awesome at repetitive tasks, we made a script for doing that automagically, so TR can earn a little cash while annoying no-one. Win-win!

It's a tiny sliver of Javascript that is very specific in its work, acting only on post areas, and only on links it recognizes, changing them from their original format to a TR-referral format. It acts on the page HTML that's already output, so it doesn't touch your posts should you need to edit them. There's no real performance impact and the little Javascript will become cached as soon as it's downloaded, so you won't waste your precious 3G megabytes.

It's actually been active in the forums for a little while, just wearing a trenchcoat and shades. And eventually we'll introduce it to the frontpage and the respective comment areas.

So don't find it odd if you see links starting with "kqzfy.com", etc. They're kosher.
There is a fixed amount of intelligence on the planet, and the population keeps growing :(
 
Forge
Lord High Gerbil
Posts: 8253
Joined: Wed Dec 26, 2001 7:00 pm
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Re: TR link-auto-affiliate script

Tue Jul 30, 2013 7:56 pm

If you whine about the compute cycles or bandwidth consumed thereby, I will follow you from post to post, comment to comment, and mock you ferociously and mercilessly, without surcease. You are warned.
Please don't edit my signature for me. Thanks.

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