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Update 7/10/06 — see the bottom of this post for a day-after update.

Word out of Affiliate Summit in Orlando is that a Commission Junction representative has stated that there’s no end to regular HTML links. If this is in fact true, that’s great news. Independent reports are on Revenews and ABW.

I’m not there, but based on the reports, this doesn’t seem like an official announcement. I don’t consider it official until I see something on their website or in email. If there’s anything to this, surely there’s more to come in the next few days.

Coincidentally, I was in the Commission Junction MA office on Friday handing in the petition. As promised, I delivered it in person. While it’s been available online since the start, it has some big names hidden from public view. Once I get confirmation that it’s been presented to Tom Vadnais and his staff this week in Santa Barbara, I’ll post the cover letter I wrote to go along with it.

While I was there on Friday, I didn’t hear anything about an official change on the Link Management Initiative. Doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Thanks to all of you who signed the petition. I do believe that it has made a difference. Until I get confirmation that the rumors out of Orlando are for real, I’ll leave the CJ LMI petition open for signatures.

Update 7/10/06: After a day to poke around, I’m pretty well convinced that Commission Junction has made no concessions at this point. Again, I wasn’t there at Affiliate Summit to get any context, but I’m guessing that the person who made the comments was misunderstood to be saying more than he was really saying.

Perhaps being put on the spot, he was trying his best to remain optimistic and encouraging that CJ wasn’t going to do something outrageous or hasty. And while trying to reiterate that there was no deadline to the change (which is their current position), it came off more strongly, people got excited and reported what they thought they heard — that CJ has formally reversed their plans.

I cannot believe that any approved statement saying “never a complete change to Javascript links” would come out of CJ at this point. They simply cannot make such a promise. In fact, we don’t have that promise from any provider. Who knows what the technological future will bring? While it’s not the case for the forseeable future, maybe in several years it’ll be perfectly acceptable or even necessary to have only Javascript links.

So to answer my own question posed in the title of this entry, I’m going to say it’s a “no, nothing’s really changed.” Status quo: Commission Junction has indefinitely postponed a hard-change to Javascript. They have not made a “never Javascript only” statement.