Hi all,
A few months ago I was creating a small amount of revenue for a charitable
effort from a referral program. Back in August it stopped producing results
and only recently I began looking into the way it worked
Basically the referrer provides a link to a cgi script, which I can't see
but I can see the result, specifically
http://www.ikobo.com/ref.cgi?r=myref
which returns the home page www.ikobo.com
In this page there is a javascript function which captures and saves
window.document.referrer in an <IMG>
statement
My observations were that referred links were recorded but no signups were
evident.
Now, I suddenly realised that since Microsoft brought out SP2 of XP,
Javascript would tend to be blocked unless specifically allowed. This is
what I would like an opinion on before I present my assertion to Ikobo, that
from the logon page, their dependence on Javascript means that in many
cases, affiliates links will generate no trace of activity.
I'm not going to publish their code on a public forum but by saving the home
page and opening with an editor, it can be found at the end of the body.
I wouldn't have done it this way myself, as far as I can see there's no more
security building the referrer linking within the main program, it might
have just as easily been done in the preceding cgi and held as a hidden
field. Either way, there's the potential for it to be altered as the warning
in the code indicates.
My problem isn't the code of course, it's getting the site to acknowledge
fault, though I have registered a BBB complaint about it
Jeff Mowatt
