Issue #3309785 by binnythomas: Add Basic Readme file

Uber Affiliate

Uber Affiliate module

OVERVIEW

This module allows site owners to issue affiliate links to their partners. When an

affiliate is logged in and viewing a node, they will see the option to "display the

affiliate link" towards the bottom. When anonymous users follow these links, provided they

have been granted the proper permissions, the clicks are counted by affiliate, day, and

referrer.  When referred users sign up for an account, and if your site uses the referral

module, the referred account is associated with that affiliate.

This module is a port of the Drupal 7 Affiliate module.

INSTALLATION

- Activate the module as usual

- Grant permission(s) to each role as is appropriate for your setup

USAGE

- For a user to become an affiliate, they must have the permission

  to "opt in or out as an affiliate", at which point they can visit their account page

  and check the option to opt in.

- Affiliate links are any site path that have the following structure:

    www.example.com/affiliate/AFF_ID/OPTIONAL_DESTINATION_PATH/OPTIONAL_TRACKER_ID

  ... where AFF_ID is the affiliate's user ID, and OPTIONAL_DESTINATION_PATH is any

  eligible path, as set on the affiliate config page, with one exception. If the path

  specified is a node path, for example, node/4, or any other path with a slash in it,

  the slash needs to be replaced with a pipe character (a pipe character is a | symbol).

  If OPTIONAL_DESTINATION_PATH is not present, the person who clicked will be redirected

  to the front page and no credit will be issued to the affiliate.

  So, say the desired destination is node/867, and the affiliate's user ID is 5309. The

  link for them to get credit would look something like this:

    www.example.com/affiliate/5309/node|867

  The OPTIONAL_TRACKER_ID is currently not taken into account, but it will be soon. Right

  now it can be present or not, and should not have any effect on whether the affiliate

  receives credit.

  Even though the displayed URL is node|867, the user who clicked will be redirected to

  the corresponding path alias, if one exists, upon clicking.

- Payout amounts can be configured and customized for each click and/or referral an

  affiliate gets credit for. For instance, if you want each affiliate to receive a credit

  of 0.01 for each click, and 5.00 for each referral, you can configure such on the

  affiliate payouts config page. You can also configure the way your payouts are displayed

  based on your locale. So if your locale is in France, you can set the payouts to be

  displayed with the monetary amount first, followed by a euro sign (e.g. 20 �). Likewise,

  if your locale is in the US, you can configure the currency symbol to be displayed

  first, followed by the amount (e.g. $20).

- Payouts, clicks, and optionally referrals and user points are all updated when cron runs

- Several measures are in place that attempt to prevent an affiliate from "cheating", some

  of which include checking to make sure the user who clicked is not the user that's

  currently logged in, checking that the click came from another website (and was not

  arbitrarily entered into the a URL box of the person's browser), checking to make sure

  the same IP address has not accessed multiple affiliate links within a given period (if

  configured to do so on the affiliate admin page), etc. Keep in mind though that people

  with the right knowledge will always be able to find a way to slip through the cracks,

  so keep an eye on your logs.

CREDITS

This module is derived from the Affiliate module for Drupal 7 written by Jeremy Trojan

and Barry Jaspan which itself is derived from the Affiliate module for Drupal  4.5,

written by Moshe Weitzman.

AUTHORS

Binny Thomas