short answer, no, they don't behave any differently when there's an afsrc=1 parameter or an identifiable affiliate link than when not.
But, they don't automatically redirect in any case. They always show the popup. The guys that do something special for afsrc=1 is to show a popup when they would otherwise redirect automatically.
Now if that "Warn before redirecting" checkbox is unchecked by the user, things get really ugly. From what I saw, they redirect automatically no matter what, and they send the user to a 404 page on http://we-care.com" rel="nofollow">we-care.com.
Jamie, let me add that from what I saw, http://we-care.com" rel="nofollow">we-care.com is doing nothing that violates the Publisher Code of Conduct (CJ/GAN) or LS's terms of how a sofware plugin should behave.
As long as they are showing the user a pop-up that they click before redirecting through the we-care affiliate link, they don't need to worry about whether there was previously an affiliate link clicked or not:
"Interference with referrals. No Web site publisher or software download technology provider may interfere with or seek to improperly influence the referral of an end-user to the Web site of an online advertiser unless the end-user knowingly and explicitly consents to that behavior by taking an affirmative action."
Of course that sucks, which is the whole point.
Some of the plugins will completely leave the affilaite link alone, if it is an identifiable link from a network or has afsrc=1, but that's not required.
I'll say it again, that's not required.
As I said in my update above while you were replying to me, all that is required is that "the end-user knowingly and explicitly consents to that behavior by taking an affirmative action."
A little off topic, but since we are talking about who gets commissions, etc...
I was wondering if you had noticed a recent increase in cookie stuffing? It seems like somethings going on here for the last couple of months because my analytics aren't jiving with past conversion stats. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but would like to know if you've heard or noticed anything... Thanks.
I'm the General Manager of We-Care.com, and I just wanted to add a comment here. It is not our intention to overwrite anyone's commissions. Unfortunately, our plug-ins have not been performing as we intended. To that end, we removed our plug-ins back in mid-December, and we are currently updating them to make sure they aren't overwriting cookies. (Unfortunately, looking for afscr=1 isn't enough.)
We will relaunch the plug-ins when we are satisfied that they are working properly. At that time, anyone is welcome to try them out. If you find any instances of them overwriting cookies, please let us know and we will address them immediately.
© 2012 http://www.jangro.com/
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I'm hoping that by doing this, in conjunction with others who are doing similar screencasts, we can raise some visibility to this unfair practice in affiliate marketing.
First up is we-care.com. I've been using and watching this plugin for a week or two. In short, it always pops up, giving the user the choice of giving to their we-care.com cause from their purchase. It pops up indiscriminiately, no matter how the user gets to the merchant site (affiliate, PPC, search, direct type-ins) as I'll demonstrate in the video below.
From what I can tell, they do not ever redirect automatically like some do.
Actually, that's not entirely true. They do allow their users to configure the plugin, at least on Firefox, to that it does not "Warn before redirecting". In this case it will try to redirect without warning, regardless of where the traffic comes from.
Unfortunately for we-care and their users, the automatic redirect URL produces a 404 error on the we-care.com site. Apparently they have this mis-configured, or not set up yet. If they had this designed properly, it would redirect automatically and invisibly every time. (Sorry, I didn't capture this in the video. Maybe I'll do another.)
There's the basic overview. Click to watch the video to see this toolbar in action.
Is this useful? Let me know in the comments.