Linkshare's most recent major undertaking is called project "Athena".

In a nutshell, this project appears to be a massive affiliate database redesign and cleanup. As a result, affiliates must re-register with Linkshare with contact information that represents a "Legal Entity". They are running this information through some service that "verifies" the tax ID against the legal name on the account.

Knowing that Linkshare is very legal-minded (owned and operated by lawyers), it is no surprise that they make a move in this direction. Having seen the seedy dark underbelly of affiliate marketing, I know that there's a lot of trash to clean out and I think it could be a big help toward eliminating fraud. I also know that this has potential for going very poorly. Some industry-folk, like Connie Berg and the commenters in her blog, wonder if they are going too far. Others, have hope that this will be something good.

Generally, it's not fun to put a large demanding group like affiliate marketers through such pain without a little sumpin'-sumpin' for their troubles. The carrot: Consolidated payments, the promise of receiving payments from all merchants in one check or electronic transfer. Shawn Collins outlines the timeline here.

So they recently launched the new functionality, with that carrot, plus a stick: If you do not register under the new process, you cannot get paid by merchants who change to the new consolidated payment.

Whatever it is that Linkshare has been doing must have taken them a very long time. I'd guess well over a year. Perhaps this explains the very long period of time (over two years) during which they released zero new functionality. I was wondering what they were up to. Which makes the end result all the more painful.

The launch appears to have been a disaster. Watching the affiliate marketing message boards, many affiliates (some who are perfectly legit) are unable to successfully register in this system without receiving an error message that their information cannot be verified by the third party system. It's all very mysterious and gives very little advice except to try again.

According to complaints, Linkshare's affiliate support has been completely unresponsive, there's no information on the website about these problems (it must be a FAQ by now), and the only information that seems to have surfaced is through the CEO Stephen Messer's wordy yet unsubstantial apologies on AbestWeb (with a second update) and AffiliateBoards.

What's in a Name? Anyone in software knows that project names are usually chosen very carefully and thoughtfully. In fact, way too much time is spent at technology companies thinking up good project names. Surely, project Athena is no different:

According to Pantheon.org, Athena is the Greek goddess of wisdom, war, the arts, industry, justice and skill. Interesting. Not much wisdom, skill, and industry demonstrated thus far. War? Maybe. Justice? Definitely, but not what they had in mind. It's karma, I'm sure of it.

Additionally, Athena was the favorite child of Zeus...OK, now we're getting somewhere.

I've named my share of projects in my life and I propose a project name for the work going forward: Sisyphus.