Well, I have been reading this thread for the past two hours and I'm totally exhausted too...
As Lee's initial post reads, "...Nothing like this has been developed and we feel tools should be developed within our industry.
Any thoughts? Does this have value? If you were a sponsor would you pay a monthly feel for this police dog, we loving call "Sniffy"?"
Well, I can say that I've been buried beyond belief with endless "road maps" towards fraud in the past. It takes alot of time on the part of the affiliate program. It boils down to whether the program is willing to put the time in after receiving these "red flags". It costs money to take these extra measures with or without the software. I think that it IS worth a monthly fee to have a list of webmasters and urls that are questionable waiting in the ole inbox first thing in the morning. It would save alot of time.
The keywords (along with other factors as stated) would be more than enough for me to shut down a webmaster account. Whether it be "lolita" in the meta tags, the body text, the domain, or even naming your pics "lolita1.jgp", it's up to the sponsor to decide what level to take it to. Some might give a warning, drop them WITH pay, drop them WITHOUT pay, or redirect their linkcode to a blank page without telling them. It all would have to do with the severity of the offense.
Alot of webmasters use various kiddie porn terms throughout the text of their page and such simply for search engine placement. The numbers for kiddie porn searches are huge which is probably why Gary Kremen is all over it with his search engine. Sponsors may be held responsible for the actions of their affiliates someday. Every little bit helps. If this tool is cost efficient and productive, why not?
I do think that this will affect relationships between webmasters and sponsors. Some webmasters will think twice before signing up to a sponsor who supports sniffy while others will think twice if a sponsor does NOT. Also, even though any webmaster has the right to put up anti crawling code to keep sniffy out, the sponsor is totally going to wonder what they're hiding. With all the "shit" webmasters out there it's ignorant not to wonder. Maybe it'll help weed some of that out.
Anyway just my
, I'm beat and my phone just rang.... later
