$affiliates.XXX won't appear

[Sentro]

Hello guys,

I met another issue with the affiliate system and i was hoping you could help me with this.

Thing is in the back office but also in the client panel (where the client can see his affiliate stats) i just
can't get to show some variables. I mean 90% of the $affiliate.XXX are not appearing at all.

Only the $affiliate.id works fine. Everything else from $affiliate.blance to $affiliate.first name etc etc is not working.
Nothing is displayed.

Was hoping you know something.

Thank you in advance

[tallship]

I have an idea. It stems from an idea of my own to implement affiliate services.

First, everything I see about the HostBill affiliate system seems to suck really bad. Poorly thought out, incapable management, incorrect stats, etc., etc...

This is just from what I see from people posting of course.

Now the idea....

So-called, *affiliates* are usually people who want something for nothing. They pop a link on their website with an http://sld.tld/afnum1234567abcd and expect people to click on that link and buy services through a third party, w/o any responsibility to the people they referred. Everything goes on the actual provider, which is likely how the provider wants it anyway, since affiliates are often incompetent buffoons who would misrepresent anyway.

I'm personally not really that interested in someone making claims and then sending the bundle to me to sort out with the end user, who may have been mislead.

When I want to use an affiliate link, it's because someone I know has recommended a product or service and I believe that they can vouch for it. For example, buildamodule.com has affiliate links for their subscribers. A friend of mine recommended it highly and so before I signed up I made him dig up his affiliate link and give it to me so I could sign up that way as a thank you.

Other than that, when I see an affiliate link I almost always circumvent them by stripping off the affiliate ID, opening a new browser, and going to the real link - I'm sure that's what most folks would do with HostBill's affiliate link system.

Here's my idea. First, make the so-called affiliate responsible for handline the tier1 sales, and phone support for the customers. tickets would of course go through the provider.

Don't compete w/your affiliates - charge more for all of your products than that same product for your affiliates. You can otherwise discuss how much your affiliate wants to charge.

Make them accountable - require them to have their own website, and create hidden order pages with direct cart links to the product. Anyone signing up will signup via those direct cart links and it will be easy to ascertain exactly what the commission is that will be due to your affiliate, simply by the name of the product - i.e., acme5-vps-blahblahblah, where acme5 is your affiliate.

They do all of their own advertising and conversions into sales, where the customer is simply directed to your order page by the direct cart link on your affiliate's site.

Easy Peasy.

This is a model I am introducing, mainly because I don't want to drive sales from my own site, but from other branded sites under other domains I own.

I would be interested in hearing feedback on what others here think about that, perhaps some caveats and/or bonuses I didn't think about.

[Sentro]

Can someone for the love of god exaplin this?? I've spent 2 days trying to code some smarty-php files to make it work but still a dead end.

[Sentro]

What kind of fcked up community is this??

Can't someone even look and see if the same happens with him??

Not even that?? I didnt ask you to code or anything.
At least so that i know if its my error due to settings or its a freaking bug.

[tallship]

What kind of fcked up community is this??

It is a small, volunteer community of service providers that are still using a dying, perhaps almost dead, software application called HostBill.

If you haven't noticed already, the number of people still using HostBill has dwindled to almost nothing - the software is broken in several places and in several ways, continues to receive ridiculous "new" modules while long standing bugs are ignored, comes with no support, and is only purchased by fools who are too stooopid to gooogle.

Can't someone even look and see if the same happens with him??

I thought I was clear when I pointed out that the affiliate system is widely considered to be almost completely broken, and certainly so for calculating and reporting correctly. I did offer an idea that I've implemented which works well for me, but I don't know of anyone who has continued to attempt to use the affiliate system. Perhaps there are some, but you're prolly going to need to perform many calculations yourself.

Not even that?? I didnt ask you to code or anything.
At least so that i know if its my error due to settings or its a freaking bug.

You might consider offering to pay someone to test this feature that appears to have no one interested in. After all, HostBill is used by people who charge money for services and there are prolly people who are willing to charge to help.

Lambasting a crowd of people who are in mass exodus mode for not bothering to test a feature for you, that is just categorically considered unusable (or at least, woefully unreliable), might actually in fact be the answer you've been looking for.

Maybe you should open a bug report, "Ask CEO", or buy a pack of trouble tickets. I know that several folks here are always interested in making wagers as to whether kbkp will answer and if so, how long it will take.

I hope that helps. You are truly on your own, with the exception of this community, which is fast dwindling as the software product itself dies off. So if no one responds, it's because there's no interest in looking back on software that has been abandoned - especially for features that are widely thought to be useless and therefore, not really used by many.

[Patrick]

What kind of fcked up community is this??

You ask for help, then i read this.  You have a set of balls on you to still expect help.  I volunteer my time here, none of us work for Hostbill.  I am the same as you, a regular business running Hostbill as our billing platform and decided to offer help to others who use it because KBKP has screwed many if not all their customers thus far.

You can try WHT for help but mods that see any Hostbill threads pop up are locked, so my suggestion to you is to not insult any of the volunteers (mods, admins or regular users) who frequent the forums to help others and discuss.

[Sentro]

It is a small, volunteer community of service providers that are still using a dying, perhaps almost dead, software application called HostBill.

If you haven't noticed already, the number of people still using HostBill has dwindled to almost nothing - the software is broken in several places and in several ways, continues to receive ridiculous "new" modules while long standing bugs are ignored, comes with no support, and is only purchased by fools who are too stooopid to gooogle.

I thought I was clear when I pointed out that the affiliate system is widely considered to be almost completely broken, and certainly so for calculating and reporting correctly. I did offer an idea that I've implemented which works well for me, but I don't know of anyone who has continued to attempt to use the affiliate system. Perhaps there are some, but you're prolly going to need to perform many calculations yourself.

You might consider offering to pay someone to test this feature that appears to have no one interested in. After all, HostBill is used by people who charge money for services and there are prolly people who are willing to charge to help.

Lambasting a crowd of people who are in mass exodus mode for not bothering to test a feature for you, that is just categorically considered unusable (or at least, woefully unreliable), might actually in fact be the answer you've been looking for.

Maybe you should open a bug report, "Ask CEO", or buy a pack of trouble tickets. I know that several folks here are always interested in making wagers as to whether kbkp will answer and if so, how long it will take.

I hope that helps. You are truly on your own, with the exception of this community, which is fast dwindling as the software product itself dies off. So if no one responds, it's because there's no interest in looking back on software that has been abandoned - especially for features that are widely thought to be useless and therefore, not really used by many.

Tallship you are in the few exceptions in this forum that care and want to help each other.
I read your opinion on your affiliate subject and i kinda agree with it. I'll explain in details later when i find the time.

Now on the subject i didn't ask for someone's not more that 5 min. MAX 5 min.
The thing got 30 views, all i asked was, see my picture, go to your hostbill which is MAX 2 minute, and see if the details are there on your affiliates.
On Hostbill features (on the website) it shows up just fine.


Anyway i managed to work this thing after 2-3 days of coding.

[Sentro]

You ask for help, then i read this.  You have a set of balls on you to still expect help.  I volunteer my time here, none of us work for Hostbill.  I am the same as you, a regular business running Hostbill as our billing platform and decided to offer help to others who use it because KBKP has screwed many if not all their customers thus far.

You can try WHT for help but mods that see any Hostbill threads pop up are locked, so my suggestion to you is to not insult any of the volunteers (mods, admins or regular users) who frequent the forums to help others and discuss.

Up to this moment i've posted around 3-4 thread and i've only got an answer from Tallship and thetrusteeco.
Maybe you or the others couldn't answer but some where as simple as this to just check something if my settings are the fault or it's a bug.

Anyway thank you for your time and sorry if i've insulted you.

[Patrick]

Up to this moment i've posted around 3-4 thread and i've only got an answer from Tallship and thetrusteeco.
Maybe you or the others couldn't answer but some where as simple as this to just check something if my settings are the fault or it's a bug.

Anyway thank you for your time and sorry if i've insulted you.

We all have businesses to run and are not paid to be here to help.  Each of us return on spare time to do our best to help.  At the present time as Tallship has said, many have or are looking for an alternative billing platform or are in the process of the switch.  When times get busy between work life and home family life, it's very difficult (i won't speak for others) but myself to juggle time with my kids, wife since i dedicate a lot of my time to my business.  I guarantee everyone else here does the same.

A lot of us aren't 17 year old kids trying out the software from our parents home worry free other than our homework. 

So when it takes a little extra time, especially with volunteers, you need to have a little patience.  This forum is here pretty much against what KBKP Software wants.  They shutdown the official forum and made contacting them impossible on a budget for younger/smaller hosts.  There are a multitude of bugs in this software we have all been on their case about for years and they have since May 26th essentially screwed each of us on any fixes or hope of any fixes. 

All i can ask is for you to wait it out until one of us with a developer license can physically take some time and test out your issue and see if we can come up with solutions/answers.  For us, we don't have a developer license and for that reason alone is why we don't do a lot of testing in that regard.

For you or anyone who reads this post.  Please understand no one here is paid to help.  Getting help from this community is pure courtesy from other Hostbill owners just like you and nothing more