The forums for sponsor affiliate programs have been exclusively available to private GPWA members for many years. This has offered the benefit of communication with affiliate programs in a relatively sheltered environment. I think these sheltered areas for communication with affiliate programs have been valuable to GPWA members over the years, and we intend to preserve them.
However, the fact that we have exclusively had private forums not visible to everyone has meant that very little information about affiliate programs has been available to most GPWA visitors. It has been suggested to us that it makes sense for a lot of information about affiliate programs to be generally available to the public and I agree. One very good example of this is posts by affiliate programs themselves about announcements related to their programs.
So we are going to be modifying the affiliate program forums to have the best of both worlds. The main forum for an affiliate program will be public, and each affiliate program forum will have a private subforum. Of course, information currently posted in the private forums will remain in the private forums except where it is safe to be moved to the public area. The one case where we are moving information to the public area now is announcement posts made by the affiliate manager than do not have reply posts by private members.
The first forum we have transformed to this new format is the forum for Wager Profits. Shaun of Wager Profits was the most active affiliate program representative in the GPWA forums in February, so converting the forum for his program first is our special way of saying thank you to him.
You can view the new, improved Wager Profits forum with both public and private sections here:
www.gpwa.org/forum/wager-profits-affiliate-program.html.
We'll be changing the forums for all affiliate programs in the coming days as time permits.
Michael