I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other, but ...
Quote:
Originally Posted by BigPimpCash
I can only see two reasons... 1 to stop randoms going through your promo content and burnign additional bandwidth (not a bad reason)
Or secondly to stop people from accessing the galleries and getting it for free,
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Another reason is the convenience of having the HTML automatically generated
with your CORRECT linking code. Another is possibly integrating the galleries with
other parts of the affiliate system, like reports, though with most affiliate systems
being handled by CCBill or NATS these days the second reason isn't particularly
common. Having the html generated with your correct affiliate code and things
liek that do make sense, to me. You can instead just use simple form that says
"enter your affiliate ID here" and that works so long as the webmaster doesn't make
a typo. I once sent a bunch of sales with the wrong affiliate ID using such a system -
logging in would have prevented that.
Another reason is more subtle and kind of "murky". Generally, for security reasons
and otherwise, it's a good idea to limit access to ANYTHING in your business to
only those people who should have that access. It may not be immediately apparent
exactly HOW public access could end up being bad, but we know that in general many
security problems happen when things are made more available than necessary, so
someone who focused on security, like me, would probably have you log in.
Here's one contrived example of how public access could hurt you in a way that
you wouldn't have predicted. Recently there was wide ranging hack that was tried
on most web servers. It involved "SQL injection" - posting sneaky code in everybody's
forms to attack any scripts using an SQL backend. The hack scripts automatically
searched Google for forms and hit every form they could find. If you had a publicly
accessible PHP script which generated affiliate links for galleries listed in a database,
your whole database of URLs could have ben changed to hack URLs. Your affiliate
tools wouldn't be subject to these random attacks if they were protected by a log in.
Not that the exact scenario I described happens often - the point is that unexpected
events happen often and the better you control access to any of your systems the
lower the chance you'll get screwed in one way or another.