Question Location of Ebay Widget code ?

Kunena has been profiting off all of our installs

Apart from the fact no one at Kunena is likely to have become a millionaire from EBay referrals, I think this is great news. Perhaps you have forgotten how much you paid for your copy of all their hard work and dedication? This is FREE software! The developers deserve every cent we can give them.

As for "sneaky", how is that the case when it is Kunena developers in this thread telling you how to add your own ode? For goodness sake .........

kiwi3685 wrote:

Kunena has been profiting off all of our installs

Apart from the fact no one at Kunena is likely to have become a millionaire from EBay referrals, I think this is great news. Perhaps you have forgotten how much you paid for your copy of all their hard work and dedication? This is FREE software! The developers deserve every cent we can give them.

As for "sneaky", how is that the case when it is Kunena developers in this thread telling you how to add your own ode? For goodness sake .........

1. You probably don't have an eBay partner account. Each click is worth between $.10 and $1.00 depending on your EPC. I have one site that only has a few users that racks up nearly $30 a month. Multiply this by hundreds of installs, large sites, etc... they are making some good cash.

2. Yes i agree the software is free, but to hide this is sneaky. What the developer is not telling you is that based on how their code is written, it doesn't matter what you put in the URL in the editor, their code strips out your eBay partner network ID and puts in their own! Thats not sneaky?

Here is their code, this is ONE of 6 replacements they are doing in kunena.parser.php The campid=5336042350 is their, or someone's campaign ID with eBay Partner Network. If you know how to read regex, you can see that they are parsing out the eBay Item ID and then inserting that into the link with their campaign ID. So even if you put a link into the editor that has your campaign ID, it will remove it.

This same replace is done to items, sellers, and searches and has 6 spots in their code where it can be done. Maybe the developers aren't aware that someone slipped this in? who knows...

I confirmed this is in Kunena 2.0 as well, but the code is newer and is in /com_kunena/libraries/bbcode/bbcode.php

Instead of accusing people we could just ask them:

Are the Kunena devs aware the ebay widget adds an ebay affiliate ID? If so, can we expect an option to add our own affiliate ID.

(Even an open source project needs funds to operate, hosting, organizing meetings etc costs money. Adds in the forums are visible ways to compensate the costs somewhat. The affiliate links are not visible and should have been documented somewhere to avoid discussions like this.)

John wrote: Instead of accusing people we could just ask them:

Are the Kunena devs aware the ebay widget adds an ebay affiliate ID? If so, can we expect an option to add our own affiliate ID.

(Even an open source project needs funds to operate, hosting, organizing meetings etc costs money. Adds in the forums are visible ways to compensate the costs somewhat. The affiliate links are not visible and should have been documented somewhere to avoid discussions like this.)

Agreed, i may be a bit quick to accuse here.. but i was shocked to find this.

Yes this should be disclosed, and if anything something like this in the config portion of the admin:

eBay Campaign ID: 1234567 (1234567 is the default ID, if you choose to support Kunena's development please leave this # as it will help generate revenue for further development. You may change this to your own Campaign ID, if you do so, consider making a donation to us.

Problem solved if that was the case.. again I apologize if i'm coming off accusatory but after running another site w/Kunena for years i now know what $$$ i've lost..

I was unaware of this until very recently (just before RC1) when I rewrote the widget code to use the new URLs. The code has been there forever (FireBoard 1.0.5); need to check who owns the campaign ID ASAP.

Wow, so someone has been making some mad cash! I'd contact eBay Partner Network, they may help you find out who it belongs to.

One of the original programmers of Fireboard....just a long forgotten piece of coding.

Maybe following wdwms98's suggustion is a good idea to help raise funds and give users an option:

Yes this should be disclosed, and if anything something like this in the config portion of the admin:

eBay Campaign ID: 1234567 (1234567 is the default ID, if you choose to support Kunena's development please leave this # as it will help generate revenue for further development. You may change this to your own Campaign ID, if you do so, consider making a donation to us.

wdwms98 wrote: Wow, so someone has been making some mad cash! I'd contact eBay Partner Network, they may help you find out who it belongs to.

The widget code goes back to Fireboard and when the widget was first beta tested and not even publicly available. We need to update it and setup a dedicated Kunena code for it.

If you want to support this project and donate some extra money feel free to do so on the home page here. So far it has been my own money that has run the fully managed hosting for this site.

Just to make things clear its more than 300-500 bucks per month plus legal fees for Trademark and the Patent office. I'd say I personally have multiple thousand dollar invested into this project, after all the advertising revenue we get.

To accuse anybody on this team to make mad money from this is just absurd, but its a great topic to stir the pot.

I like the idea to make this configurable and will setup a dedicated code for Kunena just so we can track this.

Sounds like a good plan to get some extra revenue's to support Kunena. My site can be paid out of the add revenue's, keeping the Kunena affiliate ID would be a nice way to support Kunena.

Perhaps you can make an updated file with a Kunena ID for the ones who want to support Kunena in this version?