URL cloaking and affiliates

Discussion in 'Troubleshooting' started by weasel, Aug 28, 2006.

  1. weasel

    weasel New Member

    Joined:
    Aug 8, 2006
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    14
    I am trying to set up an agffiliate system whereby affiliates can access my website with a simple URL rather than using the
    http://sitename.com?r=XX&b=0
    affiliate links.

    My 1st thought was a simple redirect either in HTML or phpand these work fine, but do not hide the actual URL of my site.

    My second idea was to use a frameset on site affiliate.com so that mysite .com appears in a single frame. The problem I am having with this is that the php session stuff does not apppear to work inside the frameset, so users can not login etc.

    Anybody any ideas on this?
  2. alex

    alex aMember Pro Customer Staff Member

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    Jan 24, 2004
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    6,021
    I don't understand the problem. Once user is redirected to your website by affiliate link, cookie will be set and the visitor will see just simple urls anywhere.
  3. weasel

    weasel New Member

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    Aug 8, 2006
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    I wanted to give my affiliates a totally new and distinct brand e.g. my site is xxx.com, but my affiliate's URL is yyy.com.

    Using a simple redirect is possible, but once redirected, the user's see site xxx.com

    The problem was redirecting URLs and masking the redirecting so users thought they were accessing site yyy.com not site xxx.com. ISPs acheive this by including the homepage xxx.com in a frameset on yyy.com so that the actualy site URL is hidden from view. This of course causes problems with cookies because the browser creates a cookie for yyy.com whereas inside the frame, a cookie for xxx.com is expected.

    I have achieved what I want by using apache as a reverse proxy and pointing yyy.com to the apache server at xxx.com using a DNS A or CNAME record. I also configured apache to add a virtual host yyy.com at xxx.com that uses the ProxyPass and ProxyPassReverse directives to pass all call for yyy.com to the real site xxx.com, rewriteing the URL info on the way

    Also, at the top of each page, I have a php include that check the $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_SERVER'] variable i.e. where the URL originated (yyy.com). I then have a "switch" statement in the php include that sets up a load of variables depending upon the originator and sets the affiliate cookie.

    This approach allows me to change the META TAGS on the page, page content (logos, taglines etc) and even lets me use different style sheets for different virtual sites.

    So I can give any affiliate the ability to have their own distinct brand identity
  4. alex

    alex aMember Pro Customer Staff Member

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  5. weasel

    weasel New Member

    Joined:
    Aug 8, 2006
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    Tried that but cookies do not work across different domains

    The amember frame willl create a coookie for site xxx.com and the browser will be expecting yyy.com, so all session stuff etc will not work which make amember unusable because a user can not log on


    Anyway, I got around the problem by using Apache as a reverse proxy, so its no longer an issue for me

    Thanks for the reply

    Chris

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