The affiliate program of ACOP(American Consumer Opinion) is sometimes broken. The affiliate server has been down twice for long time since I joined it, either for the view report page or for the affiliate links. Once the server is down when you try to open one of those pages you’ll get an http 500 server error with the message “Server Error in ‘/’ Application.” There must be an error in the server’s configuration that needs to be fixed.
There’s another glitch in that affiliate program’s design, that the text links are not supposed to have impressions. Since the static text links are just a bunch of code within the web page, when we load the web page we don’t load anything from the server that tracks the link’s impressions. Impressions can only be tracked from the ads that load images, scripts, or others from the server. Because of this mistake I get only one impression in total per many clicks and a click through rate much higher than 100%. That was not possible. The first time I saw this I was frightened, until I realize that they can know how many times the link is clicked, but not how many times it’s loaded.
The other mistake in the affiliate program is that if you use an email address with numbers only in the domain name like ***@163.com or ***@126.com, it rejects the registrations automatically. That affected many users from China since many of them use those kinds of email address. I didn’t realize that until many people told me that they had failed the registration, and they all used those kinds of email address. This glitch is more serious and I hope they fix that as soon as possible.
update: Although There’s some glitches in its affiliate program, it actually PAYS, on 12/23/2006 I got the check from it.