In all seriousness, I have a question...
 

What is wrong with the following set up?

domain.com/index.html --> Adult Content Warning
Click 'Enter' and go to domain.com/tour
/tour goes to biller A
/index.html is the ONLY place on the entire site that links to /tour

EVERY other link on the site goes to domain.com/preview
/preview is where ALL affiliates are tracked.
/preview goes to biller B

I am told this allows for traffic leaking and screwing over affiliates. I can kind of see the point, except that the visitor would have to physically alter, type, or click a link that goes to domain.com/index.html in order to even see the other tour as there are 0 links on the site that go to domain.com/index.html. I get that it's possible, but most porn surfers I think don't bother typing, they click click click. I came to this conclusion due to only 5% of my traffic even ever goes to the /index.html page.

Yet, I am told that this cheats affiliates. I do not want to cheat affiliates at all, but I still don't get it.

How is the above any different than having multiple tours who, say, track to multiple billers and their affiliate program(s)? As far as I can tell, this is common practice (having multiple tours). But I cannot see how it is any different than above...

Especially when the affiliate in question cursed me out for trying to improve our site (we're going integrating to NATS atm) and even told me to just have a separate tour for this biller, a different tour for that biller, so on and so forth... So I cannot for the life of me get what his exact point is.

Nonetheless, I have replaced the single /tour link with a /preview link as I don't want to lose affiliates (even though this guy spazzed out like a child and claimed to have pulled all of my links already, even though I tried explaining my side.. all he did was spazz and curse me out more...

So, would someone mind explaining to me, in at least a half intelligent manner, how one is any different than the other?

Thanks

The point is ...

1) User visits site via affiliate => gets affiliate cookie
2) User doesn't sign up and closes the browser
3) 3 days later he's horny again, thinks about the site site, type's in www.domain.com or types your sitename into google
4) Goes to your index.html => tour => biller without affiliate
5) You've a sale that's not credited to the affiliate

If you've multiple tours and billers you usually use a system like NATS that tracks your sales independent of tour/biller.

I see. I was assuming they would bookmark sites they like for future reference over remembering the site url and typing it in later. This explains it a little more.

We are going to NATS, which is what started this affiliate's anger trip to begin with (I'd have to assume he doesn't like NATS, or something). Anyway, thanks for the explanation,

I wasn't looking at it that way because the affiliate in question himself said that we should just have a sperate tour for ccbill affiliate links ouside of NATS.. which kind of made his point... pointless, imo anyway.

I'll gladly accept all feedback on this matter as I don't want any affiliate to feel we are trying to screw them over. I should note though, we only had this separate tour link live for 48 hours to ensure our secondary biller was actually working before we integrate them into NATS (one step at a time). And this whole thread will be pointless once we go live with NATS as then everything will go through that. But it's been bugging me for 2 days so I wanted to get feedback from others. I know there are a lot of shitty fucking theiving crooks in this business, but we have never been, and never will be one of those. Which is why this is bothering me so much...

As an aside, I thought a 3 year track record of never having one affiliate complaint would give us some leadway into our NATS integration.. but it doesn't look like that's the case :(

Well, there are many fans of NATS but many dislike it too. I personally would signup for a NATS sponsor at any time, but ccbill only if it's something totally unique i didn't find another good site for.

Just loving NATS, hating the ccbill affiliate admin :)