GPWA Mission?

[arkyt]

You are stretching the limit of my patience with your inappropriate and undeserved insinuations.

Anyway, I have played around with the back-end of vBulletin a bit, although I don't know it very well. If I am correctly interpreting the information I found, it looks like there were 1,532 active users in the last 30 days.

I never insinuated that you, yourself changed anything Michael; only that it was likely removed for a reason. I will admit that my response - and requestioning was a bit stiffer, but that was only because I felt you skated around it the first time I asked it.

I apologize for not being more precise with my intitial question - it was a bit loaded as I knew you would most likely comment back the 7000 # ...

I appreciate you taking the time to look into the backend and finding the new number (1,532) ...

I would purpose a follow-up - Does the GPWA vbulletin software utilize any spam bot mods/guards to prevent bots from signing up for the forums? In my experience without the proper mods in place, the active user count can be distorted by these bots.

Further I would ask does the GPWA have any coding in place to differentiate real people from search engine spiders? Its also my experience that several dozen of these can visit every day - if no measures are in place the active user count can be grossly innacurate.

BetPartners IMHO it makes a lot of difference ...

I would suspect that programs were/are eager to buy into places when they were lead to believe that the site has 7000 or 8300 members ... clearly if I were in their place I might have been eager as well. BUT, if I knew that the real number was 1/20 of that I think I'd be less inclined to buy into the plan.

Now considering that and the fact that sites like this, particularly when they are 95% private do not benefit the entire industry; and you might understand why I argue that its not in the best interest of the industry as a whole for programs to be paying to advertise to a very small select few over and over and over again. Consequently my desire for an industry based in fairness and equality for all is neve realized....

What i care about are conflicts of interest, open declarations on their approval programs, how they arbitrate in disputes between affiliates and programs, how they decide when a program steps out of line, their procedures in all this and so forth.

I'm not sure GPWA arbitrates disputes between affiliates and programs ... I too would like to learn whether or not they do; and if so how that process is handled.

I say I'm not sure because I recently inquired about GPWA mediating a case, and I was challenged to do my own investigation. I followed that up with my post in this thread about the GPWA mission and was told I should ask the original owner what the mission is .... those responses were both very intriguing and very telling to me.

[MichaelCorfman]

Does the GPWA vbulletin software utilize any spam bot mods/guards to prevent bots from signing up for the forums? In my experience without the proper mods in place, the active user count can be distorted by these bots.

Further I would ask does the GPWA have any coding in place to differentiate real people from search engine spiders? Its also my experience that several dozen of these can visit every day - if no measures are in place the active user count can be grossly innacurate.

I would suspect that programs were/are eager to buy into places when they were lead to believe that the site has 7000 or 8300 members ... clearly if I were in their place I might have been eager as well. BUT, if I knew that the real number was 1/20 of that I think I'd be less inclined to buy into the plan.

The real numbers are actually likely higher than that. Most forum visitors do not register and post, and only registered users are included in the vBulletin counts.

In terms of protection against spammers, which is the primary concern relating to false registrations by robots as opposed to humans, my understanding is we use captcha2, and we require e-mail confirmation for registration to be complete.

Now considering that and the fact that sites like this, particularly when they are 95% private do not benefit the entire industry; and you might understand why I argue that its not in the best interest of the industry as a whole for programs to be paying to advertise to a very small select few over and over and over again. Consequently my desire for an industry based in fairness and equality for all is neve realized....

I don't know where you get the idea that 95% of the GPWA site is private. The areas outside the forums are completely public, and almost as many posts are available to public members as are available exclusively to private members.

I'm not sure GPWA arbitrates disputes between affiliates and programs ... I too would like to learn whether or not they do; and if so how that process is handled.

I say I'm not sure because I recently inquired about GPWA mediating a case, and I was challenged to do my own investigation. I followed that up with my post in this thread about the GPWA mission and was told I should ask the original owner what the mission is .... those responses were both very intriguing and very telling to me.

The GPWA generally does not mediate issues between affiliates and affiliate programs. What we do provide is forums where affiliates can state issues to affiliate programs, and where the response of the affiliate program is visible to other affiliates so that there is transparency with respect to the way the affiliate programs respond to the issues raised. Historically these have always been in the private areas of the GPWA, although with the recent steps I have taken I expect a significant number of these will be visible in public areas.

And with respect to you the statement about the mission of the GPWA, you are incorrect in what you say here. My response that you reference was not in response to the what was the mission, but rather in response to why the organization existed. In answer to that I gave my reason for becoming involved with it, and said only the original founder could answer why it was initially created. It is not reasonable to preach transparency and then twist what I said in the same post.

Michael

[Betpartners]

BetPartners IMHO it makes a lot of difference ...

I would suspect that programs were/are eager to buy into places when they were lead to believe that the site has 7000 or 8300 members ... clearly if I were in their place I might have been eager as well. BUT, if I knew that the real number was 1/20 of that I think I'd be less inclined to buy into the plan.

Now considering that and the fact that sites like this, particularly when they are 95% private do not benefit the entire industry; and you might understand why I argue that its not in the best interest of the industry as a whole for programs to be paying to advertise to a very small select few over and over and over again. Consequently my desire for an industry based in fairness and equality for all is neve realized....

A quick click on new posts or a look at whos online at any given time will give you a fair reflection on how busy a forum is,

In addition i am sure anyone wanting to be listed could easily ask Michael these questions and be given google stats or whatever tracking they use, well any affiliate program worth its salt would anyway.

In terms of transparancy my statement on that was what i cared about and most of this info is available on posts within the forum and the criteria that GPWA sets out, i was not asking for those questions to be answered.

My basic point is almost everything we need to know about GPWA is freely available to view, anything else comes close to being none of my business, an example of that is how much money GPWA makes, that simply put is indeed none of my business and i dont see how that would go towards transparancy as i dont see how exact number of visitors and active users is.

Just my opinion.

[giggles7p]

I can't believe that this discussion is even taking place. Michael has done nothing wrong here, the stats here are the same as they are in ever forum, you have new members signup all the time, and thats the stats for the board, they don't separate active members from non active members. i have joined many forums where i am a member, but i don't post, the same goes here for thousands of members, they can come when ever they like, and read post or whatever, and they are indeed MEMBERS , so the total count is correct. Its just that maybe a third of that number actual take part in posting and are considered active. So i don't know or understand what the big deal is over how many members there are?? even if a forum did manipulate how many members they had, if you liked the forum and the administrators of the forum and liked the way it was run, would the "member" count make a difference to you ?? Not to me.

[Nandakishore]

Almost anytime you may check the current users figure, you will find twice as many guests as members - at the moment I am writing this: 56 (18 members and 38 guests)- which is a convincing proof that this forum is not there just for a few private members.

[casinojack]

@Michael

If you guys wanted to be in an arbitration capacity, we at affcorner, would accept and endorse this. However, we would PREFER (not demand) that this arbitrator on your side be some time of attorney.

Thankfully, not current need for this on our side, but again,I think this is a huge thing missing for affiliates and affiliate managers

[arkyt]

Almost anytime you may check the current users figure, you will find twice as many guests as members - at the moment I am writing this: 56 (18 members and 38 guests)- which is a convincing proof that this forum is not there just for a few private members.

Yes, I agree; but I also know that most of those are unidentified bots/spiders not legitimate "guest" ...

Also today when I logged in there are a lot more public forums - that wasnt like that yesterday for me so I commend that effort. Thats a positive step forward.