Allow me to amplify on that.
I just checked my CCbill. I have (or maybe "had", who knows?) a Femjoy account, that dates to 2007. Looks like I've made 15 sales with them and had 60 rebills, the last of which died in 2011. I haven't actively promoted them in years. My all time conversion ratio with them is around 1:4300 on about 65k clicks. In the last calendar year I've sent them around 4k clicks from the ancient blog posts, no sales. Perhaps I'm due for a sale in 2014?
So, here's the unique twist. I signed up via CCbill, back in the day, but I have no record of ever having signed up for the separate Joycash account that harvests the email address they are now using to communicate with underperforming webmasters. They've got no way to email me. Looking at the Wayback Machine, there's no record that the Joycash site even existed before 2008:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://cash.femjoy.com. And if you look at the 2008 version of the site it's not clear whether there was a signup separate from your CCBill account back then; it looks like there was not. (But in those days, the Wayback Machine didn't always capture scripts properly, so it's hard to be sure.)
I certainly haven't sent a sale in the last six months, and I certainly haven't heard from Rueben. (Not his fault, he doesn't have my email.) Has FemJoy now set some sort of flag on my account that lets them silently steal my traffic but refuses to credit me for sales? There's nothing that shows in my CCbill account, but it sounds like perhaps they aren't telling CCbill when they do this. Which is pretty shitty if true. There *is* a mechanism for deactivating an affiliate account in a way that shows up in the affiliate's CCbill account, but it doesn't sound like that's what they are doing. (At least that would be honest.)
There's no reason for them not to happily accept my little trickle of ancient blog post traffic and credit me for sales if and when they happen. Costs them nothing, costs me nothing, is good business all around. And even today, if I saw a Femjoy picture on a Tumblr somewhere and liked it, my reflex (before reading this thread) would have been to reblog it with an affiliate link on one of my many blogs. I do this near-daily, using any of dozens of almost-moribund affiliate programs. It generates no great wealth but it keeps the lights on. Where's the harm in that?
But what this thread and the quoted emails has done is destroyed all trust. Now, I'm not clear whether my account is being properly credited, so why would I ever trust this sponsor enough to promote them in future? They've made it very clear that they don't value the fundamental premise of the revshare affiliate bargain, which is that links and traffic will be credited (and rebills paid) for as long as the affiliate promotion and/or the program itself might last. A program owner who does not understand and honor that bargain is worthless to affiliates.
Trust is the most precious commodity an affiliate program owner can have with his affiliates. It's easily destroyed. ANY email threatening to terminate an affiliate account that has an old installed base of promotional material is destructive of that trust, it doesn't matter what the reason might be. And Michael's posts here have done NOTHING to restore that trust. Simplest translation of "This is a management decision" is "our bosses are crooks who have decided not to honor the traffic from your old promotional efforts." There's no way to repair that disclosure once it's out there.
If I built a bunch of promotional materials in 2008, those work for both of us, forever. A sponsor who even HINTS at the possibility that they might come along later and say "sorry, if you're not working hard for us this week, we won't honor your old work" is a sponsor whom nobody should promote. And now that it appears they may be doing this without even notifying the oldest affiliates, for whom they've never had emails? As I said, it destroys the necessary trust. There are plenty of sponsors out there who are happy to have (and credit) the traffic from my ancient blog posts.