Why aren't more sponsors upgrading to NATS 4?
 

I just joined a new program and they're using Nats4.. I remember seeing another program in beta maybe 4-6 months ago that was showing it off, but I haven't really seen it since.. Especially the people already using Nats, nobody seems to be upgrading.

Any reason(s) why?

bad economy?

Could be.. I just thought there might be something more specific, like it being prohibitively expensive, or there are technical problems to upgrade, or perhaps programs just aren't willing to put in the time and effort to change.

Anyways hopefully a program owner can shed some light on this

Thoughts?

Some could say that many have put in the requests and are just um ya waiting.

From the various people I've spoken with, upgrading to NATS4 seems fairly complex. Maybe it takes more initial setup than some are finding it worth, which would be why we are seeing it more with newer programs than with old. I'm really not certain though...

As an affiliate I like nats3 more.. nats4 requires too many clicks to get the tools you need

Mo Money, Mo Problems

Honest opinion? It's going to cost the standard program more to upgrade now than to slowly rebuild for v4.

1) The revised admin is confusing.

For the affiliate, the defaults are quite nice, but to the standard affiliate manager who don't understand a table join is, they can easily get confused, and leave things half-configured, or end up making 40 redundancies anywhere when 'forgetting to click the little pink arrows' for the next stage of the configuration. The flow resembles an M.C. Escher painting for most people - and it still trips me up sometimes.

2) Virtually all third party tools will have to be completely rewritten

The members data is now two tables wide where you can match on member id to get the same info, which is pretty trivial, but trying to directly look up transactions to match to a biller id without manually seeing what's setup in the biller admin is a chore since it references the local index rather than the given account number, and this data is still encrypted as it is in NATS v3, but now you still get to have another external lookup table.

3) Biller support.

About a third of the billler merchants are implemented, as compared to V3. Including former (dead) billers, there are 75 in NATS v3.1.58.1; there are 23 total available in NATS 4.0.44.1.

4) Skins/Mailers/etc are not easily replicated and replaced.

You can't just take an old skin and slap it on V4; many, many variables have changed; $available_data. is now $mdata. for join forms, as an example, and many of the globals have been entirely re-implemented.

Here's how a mailer used to work for a default link code:
{$nats_code[1][1]}

Here's what you need to do, now for the same thing:
{nats_list_linkcodes userid=$toid program=1 site=1 tour=1 data_only=1 code_only=1}{$linkcodes.1.1.1.0.0.0}

Eventually everyone will move to V4, but many will not until they have no choice.

Exactly!

It took us a year from when we started to the final migration.

We just started working on ours, and will take 60-90 days ATLEAST!

Exactly.. Why do so many of these people have their head up their ass.. WAKE UP!!!! We've ALLREADY signed up to promote the damn program.. now we need the tools and stats FAST and EFFICIENT.. We don't need fancy graphcs and crap...

small critters craling around it ;)

still has some bugs, not everything is working yet i have a beta of it but wont go live till everything is fixed.

Yeah I guess from the technical point of view it's even more of a hassle since you have to fix all the problems.

Was there any reason to change it so much? Seems like people would have rather had updates to V3?

Why upgrade something that works fine on v3?
WG

this was my first thought too :2 cents:

honestly .. after 4 years of Nats V3 and probably going through every bug / error or change possible, alot of programs simply don't want to upgrade. no guarantee that we wont be doing it all over again.

100% the DB structure of Nats v4 is much better than Nats v3 ( Which is important imo, if your doing over 300 joins a day and have not entered into any custom DB maintenance setup )

we have a Nats v4 install, and in some ways I wish we could roll out to all of our programs. Just not happening anytime soon, lot of custom code, addons, and more that would need to be ported and that takes time and risks alot of downtime

as affiliate, I really dont like nats4, it is confusing as hell

nats 4.0 sucks
its useless, complicated, confusing.
will confuse the shit out of most affiliates
hard to compare or even see basic stats
will force affiliates to spend less time looking at stats = less traffic for affiliate programs.
huge learning curve that gets you no where

should i go on ?

should i change my sig ?

as an affiliate i prefer the nats4 interface.

bingo! i refused to be upgraded to v4

I'm seeing quite a trend of sponsors changing from NATS to CCbill or similar in the past few months. Must be the recession. It could also be a reason for people not upgrading...I can imagine people nervously watching their declining stats and considering dropping NATS alltogether won't be in the mood to update.
:2 cents:

It is real simple. NATS 4 sucks. The interface is unwieldy and counter intuitive and even worse Stats Remote cannot seem to make themselves compatible with it.

Its too hard to read referring url stats in nats 4, you have to click an extra step and then the link isn't even clickable, you have to copy and paste it. It was much easier reading referral url joins in nats 3

the waiting list to get upgraded is pretty long from what i hear

i am running on win xp and i am designing in photoshop 7 ... why upgrade if i have all i need ... as was told in this thread already :winkwink:

good point

Quite a trend? I've seen one do it. Who else is doing it?

if you cant make your stats work with stats remote and affiliates cant understand the stats interface you're practicably dead on arrival. thats just my thought. I dont know for a fact that nats4 doesnt work with stats remote. I've always liked Nats, liked them enough to donate my sig. However if they cant make it work.. sadly enough they gonna go the way of clickman, click-thru-clavin and MKStats...

Getting linking codes out of the new system is a bitch.

more nats means more more

Who?

Even if sales are slow you are only paying $150 a month for nats, and if you aren't making that then maybe you should be out of the paysite game all together.

I agree. Dropping NATS for the fees I just don't see making any sense at all. The small package is $150 a month like you mentioned... it would only take roughly 15 to 20 affiliate sales a month to cover that expense.

Nats 4 works fine in Statsremote here, Vividcash, Mofos and Nerdphobia are all using Nats4 and appear fine in my Statsremote

Exactly. My opinion as an affiliate is that I like the old NATS version way better than the new version.

When I'm looking at my stats, and I want to grab my affiliate links, I hate having to click "Tools" just to get back to a page where I click on "Links," where I can finally generate my affiliate links. "Links" should be available from any page, like it is in the old NATS. I also dislike how the new NATS has "apply time frame" and "change view" on the same page. It's confusing and I have to mess with it a few times every time before I get the view that I want.

So you pay shitloads for software like this and then need that long to get it running?

How can a company who creates software aimed at webmasters not understand this?

I really don't get this whole nats thing. Seems like a waste of money and time to me.

I'm not here to bash Nats but this shit is just beyond me...

Reading referring urls is the worst in Nats 4...

As an affiliate I prefer CCBill, I promote enough sponsors already to have individual programs and checks.

Thanks to those with constructive feedback (i.e. referring URL issues). It will be taken into account over the next couple weeks.

Also, based on user feedback of half loving the new interface and half hating it there is a "simple" skin to be released to all NATS 4 programs in the next couple of weeks which you may choose if you prefer.

i hate having to go to my account to create a campaign, then to tools and then link codes, the older versions made it so much easier.

This will be addressed shortly also. You're not yelling into the dark if you have a valid concern.

Happy this turned into some constructive commentary you can use John!

Im still waiting for the update since November 2008!

Seriously

NATS 4 looks like a lot of hard work, money and resources to have another tool dreamed up by a programmer with a PhD. To him it was the most logical thing ever. :winkwink:

What this industry needs today more than ever is money spent on the inside of the sites. we need to win the customers back to buying. After 8 years of spending lots of money on the outside of the site are you going to tell me we got it right?

Tools are important, but not as important as having a willing customer.

They are not in the content business. They are in the software business. They provide tools to gather data, assist in making sales, and the like. They need to keep innovating and upgrading no matter what you think we have or do not have gotten right.

Naturally your post jumps to the assumption that every single fucking website out there has it wrong, is not giving its customers what they want, blah blah blah. Then again I suppose sites such as FTV, twistys, azani, etc. are still also getting it all wrong and do not need such tools. There are of course hundreds of such sites out there giving their customers what they want and doing damn well at what they do. - However fuck them right, TMM should stop trying to innovate their product because so many are not giving the customer what they want. Thus do the very thing to their customers that you are bitching about in the first place.

On another note yet off topic of the thread itself yet not of your reply. It makes perfect sense for many to pay more for a CMS to run their members area as it gives them not only data about their customers, it gives them interaction, provides the customers with more, and we all know that it is much easier to keep a customer than get a new one. Knowing what your customers like, what they are viewing, clicking, etc. helps everyone out - assuming they use the data.

PS - I heard a rumor that you were not posting here any longer out of sickness, guess someone fibbed to me.

They need to adapt the existing program to make it easier and better, not try to sell something that looks like it's harder. Will they upgrade for free? But as you said they are a software company and that's how they make their money. Does it bring more money into the pot for all of us if we all upgrade to NATS 4?

As for the stupid, yes stupid statement of quoting a few companies who have it right and assume all is well. I thought you had more sense than that. Clearly I was wrong.

Or are you saying people are going to Tubes sites because paysites are a better option? All sites should aspire to get to the level of FTV, Twistys, Sapphic and more. The problem is too few do. They spend too much on driving around a reluctant buyer to sites he's seen a thousand time before. This industry needs to spend more money on what customers buy and less on driving them around.

The rumor was I would post less. Accuracy never was your forte. I have just come home from hospital where I was having 6 days chemo therapy for cancer in the tongue. I was able to come home during the day and about all I can do is post on boards. Sparring with guys like you does not require a lot of energy. :1orglaugh

Why would a rumor someone told me even be expected to be accurate, let alone take another chance at taking a jab at me when I clearly state it was a rumor - not something I read, saw you post, whatever. You can not even back up what you said about me and accuracy either btw.

Sorry to hear your having to deal with cancer. Had my own last year and dealing with another now. I am super lucky that way.

Nats pretty much operates off of a lease arrangement (some people do buy it outright). So far any and all upgrades have been free that I am aware of and are part of your monthly lease fee. I do not know for sure as I do not pay for nats myself, I just know several that do including a few I work with. Yet all other lease type programs I personally deal with get free upgrades.

Most people that are ass fucking others, really do not need to spend money on back end shit unless it makes up selling even easier. They typically use their money on getting additional merchant accounts, buying up sales from others, etc. Every so often they will toss out some money to some shooters to give them some of the same type of content they always buy. Yet that is on the low end of the list, hell it seems even lower than having affiliate reps.