Just to follow up on this one, I'd like to thank stagepassinc for working through the investigation process with us and then following up on the boards with the details on the process and outcome. We're very careful about taking action on accounts where there was fraudulent behavior like cookie stuffing, but in cases like this one, we definitely work to take the context into consideration and get to the right outcome. I'm happy that this one culminated in stagepassinc remaining in the program and strengthening the controls around his production site, and hope that the follow up on the boards has provided some useful info for everyone else as well.

Hope everyone is having a good Friday,
Steve

Well this has been quite an enlightening journey.

I said we would update and here it is.

First of all, I would like to apologize to eBay publicly for calling them out on this board as I felt they were not responding to my emails. I have since learned that a normal turnaround for a response is 3-4 days as they have a lot of internal investigation to go through first before actually speaking to the publisher.

Well to make this short. This was entirely our fault. We hired someone to help us with SEO among other things and it turned out to be a disaster on all fronts. This guy was 'optimizing' pages for us and was supposed to be limited to our test server. Then our IT manager informed the partners that he found out this guy was making pages go live without consent. When we talked to this person, it was apparent that this guy had a lot of 'black hat' ideas on how to SEO and when confronted about making pages live bypassing our own IT team, he responded that if we don't trust him he will not be able to help us. We are strictly white hat, always have been and take a lot of pride in that fact. Next it was reported that he was changing code on our site without authorization. That was enough for us and we fired him. From there our IT team began the process of overwriting his code with our back files. Then about a week later we get this email from eBay which completely blindsided us because we had no idea what it was about. Well apparently this guy used one of our pages on our site to 'test' some stat pic redirections and used the rover links which we all know is a real no no. This went completely undetected by us and remember we are talking one page out of over 150,000 pages but it was still enough to get EPN's attention (as it should be), hence the email and the removal from the program.

We worked with EPN and co-operated in every way they asked of us. It would have been very easy for them to say, we caught you and that is the end of it, but instead they showed they were indeed interested in being helpful and for any publisher who might be learning from our experience, I would suggest that you be straight forward and honest when dealing with EPN. If you are you can expect them to work with you to resolve the issue. They didn't have to believe us, but again with only one rogue page, the fact we've been in the program since 2004 and the fact the vast majority of our clicks were legitimate they were able to give us the benefit of the doubt.

Now we have controls in place that no one who is working in the test area can make anything go live without the IT manager approval.

We are still not sure what happened here whether it was this person just testing redirects and picked a rover link by accident or whether it was purposeful and an attempt to sabotage Thank god he didn't do it to more pages because it was easier to explain a rogue page than if all our sites looked like it was cookie stuffing.

Anyway, everything is now back to normal and once again, we'd like to thank Steve for his professionalism, dedication to detail and overall support in this matter. Really we can't thank him enough.

I hope this is a lesson learned for all publishers. If you are getting SEO work or anything that requires someone else building pages etc., do not give that person or company access to make the pages go live until you or your team has approved it first. But if you do have get kicked out, don't go to this board. Just reply to the email and give them time. They will get back to you and the issue can be worked out if it was a legitimate mistake. That's the good news.

Hope this helps

From today's email. Some interesting new twists...

eBay Partner Network does not compensate for sales that come from invalid click activity, which includes, but is not limited to the following:
clicks generated by a publisher clicking on their own ads
automated clicking tools/traffic sources/robots
activity generated by other deceptive software
Publishers may only place links and/or promotional content on sites they own. Affiliate links on third party sites such as Craigslist, MySpace, etc. are not allowed.
You will not redirect any traffic to middle servers for the sole purpose of masking your referring source of traffic. This includes the use of URL shortening services (including but not limited to tinyurl.com, short.to and cloakedlink.com).

dvd2sl, this forum (as well as the dozen other I use frequently) all work with referrers turned off. Just now I hit reply, it took me to the login screen then right back to the reply box here in the thread. I think the info is in the URL.

I wonder if the blocker you were using was disabling more then HTTP referrals, maybe cookies too?

ps. I appreciate Ebay bringing the referral issue to light officially instead of keeping us guessing.

I see post 48 was deleted. This is an IE only issue.

Geez, I'm using phpBay and have added onClick javascript for all my links in campaigns to track EPN clicks using Google Analytics.

Is there any way to confirm that this will indeed strip referral information?

> usedhumanorgans, have you considered that what throws a "red flag" at ePN for a high rate of blank referrers may simply be a rate significantly higher then the average rate for all affiliate accounts sending hits?
>

Yes, they said exactly that in the email.

They already have an exception process in place for legitimate users (email, software). The majority of non-referrals other than that will come from the sources I listed and are largely out of our control. The impact will vary by site. I mentioned earlier that sites frequented by the paranoid will see more of this since their users are more likely to be blocking all referrers, but it seems a lot more prevalent than that. But the point is, we can't control it.


There are some issue not on the list, because they are under the webmaster's control:
- Flash that deliberately blocks the referrer
- A side effect of using of window.open() in javascript, including onClick handlers, will cause no-referrers for click submitted from IE. IE strips off the referrer when opening a new window via javascript. I've confirmed this in IE6, but haven't seen anything suggestion 7 and 8 are different.

I think the latter is the biggest issue I've seen yet and I'll bet that it's the big culprit in no-referrer bans. It could be 70-80% of your click traffic depending on your IE/other browser mix.

> auralangels, given the things you're doing, you sure won't have to worry about referrers anyways, you'll likely be done before it comes to that. Did you read any of the ePN documentation?


Nope .. See my other thread - I'm blocked already for something do with frames they said.

I'm just hanging around here a bit to see if it's ever going to be worth the haddle and risk of trying to get back in, which it appears it isn't so I'll promote someone else instead.

I am pleased to report that EPN has finally contacted us and we will work with them to get this resolved.

I will report fairly in the end including any and all mistakes that were possibly made by our company which may help other publishers avoid this kind of situation.

OK, it's a list. Everybody panic on 3.....

auralangels, given the things you're doing, you sure won't have to worry about referrers anyways, you'll likely be done before it comes to that. Did you read any of the ePN documentation?

In the United States, "Guilty beyond a reasonble doubt" only applies to formal criminal court trials. With civil, tort and private issues, a simple "ponderance of the evidence" is considered sufficient. It was a nice try, but that's usually what happens when your opinions are derived from feelings instead of facts.

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