Affiliate Program For Digging Into WordPress Closes

The other day, I received some bum news regarding the affiliate program for the book, Digging Into WordPress by Jeff Starr and Chris Coyier. Thanks to the abuse of their affiliate system with no concrete way to battle the abuse, they have decided to phase out the program for the time being. Here is the official email sent out to members:

The important details:

– We’re turning it off this Monday at Noon EST. You are of course free to remove all links as you wish.

– We don’t benefit in any way from links left up. (It’s not a ploy for us to benefit from lingering links)

– We’re sorry =( We thought long and hard about it and we think this is our best option.

Here’s the scoop:

We’ve had a ton of fraud go through the affiliate program. A bad guy can sign up for the program and buy a bunch of books from us with stolen credit cards, and earn money. It’s extremely difficult to catch, because the people with the fraudulent charge may not even notice, or not notice for months. Meanwhile we’ve already given the bad guy money. The negative effects of this being:

– We lose money
– Our PayPal account is at serious risk of closure
– We facilitate bad things happening to people

Unfortunately the software we use to handle the affiliate program just isn’t up to the task of fighting this. So to all: THANK YOU for being an affiliate. The book has been a success in no small part because of you. If we can figure out a better way to handle this, we’ll do that and open it back up. In the mean time, if you are looking for other affiliate programs to try out, check this one out:

http://codecanyon.net/wiki/referral/referral-program/

-Chris Coyier & Jeff Starr
Digging Into WordPress
http://digwp.com

That sucks but I’ll still be keeping the link to the book on the WPTavern store because it’s a great resource that takes things a step further after WordPress For Beginners.