I have already seen a couple posts about the new hoplink generator for clickbank. Here is the full tool explanation for those of you who have concerns... https://www.clickbank.com/hoplink_encoding.htm
For some reason, I think that Clickbank messed things up - we just don't know yet. I think this encoding tool will make tracking even less accurate then it was ... Well, we'll see.
What is the point of this. Useless in my opinion. The resulting URL looks extremely spammy, like something in a phishing email. I sure won't be using it.
https://www.clickbank.com/account/systemLog.htm#2009-04-27 Clickbank says that they are not fully functional yet.
Recently updated... "HopLink Shield Links Now Fully Operational 2009-04-27 As of 3:00 p.m. PT HopLinks created using HopLink Shield are fully functional."
The URLs look awful, considering I can just make a basic redirect myself. Which would you prefer: http://h430gr9hpio49p.vendor.hop.clickbank.net OR.. http://www.mydomain.com/go/vendor No contest really, is there?
Depend on your target market. If your target didnt know anything about affiliates system both link work..
It is utterly useless because of the fact that anyone with brains enough to find ClickBank website and do a little research can decode them back so I really don't see what's the point. If they change it in such a way so you can only decode your own hoplinks then it'll become something useful.
Agreed with karabas, why have an encoder if they allow a decoder to be openly accessible to anyone. I'd suggest they only allow hoplinks to be decoded once logged in and only hoplinks tied to your account should be decodable(is that a word?). Otherwise, seems kind of pointless to me.
cldnails, I first thought so too. However decoder is only part of the problem - you can still see affiliate ID on the checkout page...
The hoplink encoder is supposed to protect you from affiliate link hijacking spyware programs. So it's not entirely bad!
Wow... Powerful protection indeed... Try this (optionally you may want to substitute "encoded" link in the script with your own). Note: you'll need to have grep, sed and wget installed (unix style utils also available on windows): Takes under a second on my machine and that's to invoke 3 general purpose executables. Imagine how fast it will be it someone writes a specialized program to do it as they will. They should have at least put this page in password protected section of the website.
I believe clickbank was trying to help us by limiting the hijacking of our accounts. I am a bit confused by all the lengthy jibberish they seem to put in the new url's.