GOG.com affiliation reestablished

[Taluntain]

I've managed to reestablish the GOG.com affiliation for RPGWatch, so we'll be starting to affiliate the links going to GOG again to help with the costs of running RPGWatch. Every sale made via an affiliated link will bring RPGWatch a few percent at no cost to yourself, making it a great way to support the site.

The RPGWatch "Channel ID" is: 1790615725

Regular GOG game page link example: https://www.gog.com/game/diablo
Affiliated GOG game page link example: https://af.gog.com/game/diablo?as=1790615725

As you can notice, you have to replace ‘www’ with ‘af’ in the link. You also have to add the channel ID to the URL, via a ‘as’ parameter.

Anyone can do this with GOG links posted on RPGWatch manually if they want to help out, but in the future I'll probably implement a solution that will affiliate all GOG links automatically.

Affiliated GOG home page link is: https://af.gog.com?as=1790615725

I'll also see about placing a GOG home page button somewhere.

Note: the affiliated links unfortunately trip certain overzealous ad blockers, such as uBlock Origin. The only way around it so to whitelist "adtraction.com" for RPGWatch, which GOG uses to track affiliate link sales, when the uBlock warning pops up when clicking on an affiliated link. If you select "Don't warn me again about this site", you only have to do it once, then click the "Proceed" button.

To emphasize, there is absolutely no danger or anything nefarious about the affiliated links. The only thing that is being tracked is RPGWatch's affiliation with GOG.com, so that they can properly attribute affiliated sales to us. uBlock blocks this simply because they block the tracking company AdTraction that GOG uses altogether, which unfortunately results in blocking such legitimate tracking uses as well.

 

[Redglyph]

The obvious thread for this, which happens to have a lot of views, is PriceWatch!.

Replacing with "af" is easy enough but the channel ID is something else...

EDIT: I used to put the GOG link in each new game entry in the database whenever possible. Not as the main game homepage field, because it's just a vendor and not the game itself, but in the description (example). I don't know if the traffic is worth it though? There might be a few links there for who has access, but maybe not for recent and future games.

 

[Taluntain]

Yea, for regular usage the link replacement needs to be automated.

 

[largh]

Is it possible to pin this information somewhere on the front page? I bet most of us would forget how to do this if it was not told in simple terms.

 

[Redglyph]

Yea, for regular usage the link replacement needs to be automated.

And probably running a script on the current database for the past links.

 

[Taluntain]

Is it possible to pin this information somewhere on the front page? I bet most of us would forget how to do this if it was not told in simple terms.

There'll be a GOG.com button on top of all the site and forum pages, so you'll be able to just click that. And all the GOG links posted in the news will already be affiliated from this point on. Later on I plan on implementing a solution that will automatically affiliate all GOG links posted on the forums as well, so no manual link manipulation will be necessary any more.

Edit: and yes, fixing all the old links too.

 

[Taluntain]

Thanks to @Arhu we have the GOG button on top of all the pages now, so any purchases made via the button will support RPGWatch.