Late last year, Dirty Tony started sending his affiliates weekly Emails with a link to the latest Free Hosted Gallery. The link in these mailings already included the affiliate’s CCBill ID, so all you had to do was copy and paste. In late January, 2008 that changed, when the affiliate’s CCBill ID suddenly disappeared from the provided gallery link.

Based on my Email archives, I was able to determine that beginning with the mailing on January 25, 2008, the affiliate’s CCBill ID was no longer included in the provided gallery URL. Changes to the format of the mailings were made on February 15 and March 14 of 2008, but the gallery link was not fixed. A link to the Dirty Tony tour was added as part of the format change in March and it too is missing the webmaster’s ID.

The language preceding the links has always clearly indicated the URL is formatted with the webmaster’s ID, so there would be no reason to suspect any change, and unless you are looking closely the missing ID is easily overlooked. Obviously it has been, because by my count, the last 10 mailings are missing the webmaster’s CCBill ID. Surly, the problem would have been fixed by now, had another affiliate caught it, but apparently none have. To make things worse, the missing ID does not break the link, so the problem will not be noticed during tasting.

I’m not suggesting this was intentional, but it seems odd Dirty Tony didn’t notice all the non affiliate sales coming in from web sites he doesn’t control. Who knows…maybe he doesn’t look at his stats that closely.