I'm sure a lot of people are sick of reading posts from people freaking out about sales drops, even in this forum. Some people attribute it to the time of year and that people are still experiencing XMAS backlash, while others are talking cookie bugs and link stealing. I know very little about all of this, but if it is at all the latter, is there some way to cloak your links so that they can't be interfered with (meaning I know there is a way to cloak your links with software but would that make it impossible for hackers to steal your sales)? Is there some more advanced software than ad aware to block bugs and cookies which would delete your info? Any recommendations on this?
hate to break it to you but you just can't do anything about software on user machines wiping cookies. well to be exact you can... on your landing page you can tell users to download antivirus and not let them go any forther until they submitted the proof that they've done do well, seriously. once you've ran some bad software on your machine it can do whatever with the machine and with data on it, including cookies. no link cloaking or anything else will help because at the end of the day clickbank makes the decision whom to award the commission based on a piece of data on the users machine - the cookie. And the bad guy has complete control of this data. only people who can do something about it are the publishers. if they look in their access logs they can identify when cookies are overwritten and they can report affiliate Id of the bad guy to ClickBank. But again well written trojan would be hard to detect even then.