Originally posted by Robert from SI
lib,
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How are webmasters expected to control this type of activity? All ads/popups are hosted on your end. I can't believe that many webmasters are running the bots themselves.
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I'm not sure you understood my statement. The persons who are doing this are con-artists, not legitimate webmasters.
Very few people (anymore) are participating in this type of activity. It's fairly easy to detect.
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I would expect that after a relatively short amount of time, you could build an open proxy list and start ignoring traffic from those proxies. How can you simply not pay the webmaster for any of the traffic?
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We do exactly that. But the list changes daily, and it's huge. It's like holding back the tide with a broom.
And weather you can delete the traffic or not you still need to terminate the fraudulent affilaite. If a kid is coming to your candy store every day and he trys to shoplift his pockets full of candy you don't allow him to keep trying every day. You kick his butt out.
But you aren't selling candy. I disagree that it can be seen as a similar thing.
Many webmasters complain about SI simply not paying out due to their account being terminated.. I can't believe that there are that many con artists out there. I am sure there are some, but I don't see any process for investigating what you believe to be fraud.
Wouldn't it clear a lot of the mess if SI at least made some sort of attempt at investigating the fraudulent traffic? Especially when you have webmasters that are otherwise well respected complaining for months on end.
"It is doubtful that either of these pages (particularly the 2nd page, since it's blank) get the quantity of unique visitors daily to accumulate the earnings shown on the account."
Regarding that quote, I do feel it quite unwise to decide a referral is fraudulent simply based on your opinion that no one is going to that site.
Anyway, I have another question if you're still reading. A free web provider has to deal with a great deal of abuse. This abuse is dealt with in various ways by that provider, but when that provider is sending popups to visitors to a porn/warez site that is illegally on that server.. what happens? This type of situation is common and completely out of the control of the server administrator (who would probably remove the account and throw some sort of banner page in its place).
I really think that SI and the other companies that run ad programs should be a little more civil. It is wonderful that a niche forum such as this has its own representitive to answer questions and such.. but still, more could be done, especially to help save the reputation of the ad programs which have become notoriously unreliable due to the economy over the last 18 months.
PS - What services out there allow you to reverse-lookup social security numbers? Are you aware of anything out there for VAT lookups?