Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Referral Program

I was unsure if this had been proposed or implemented yet, but what if RPR had a referral system? Members would gain rewards based on the number of other users who join the site.

With many other sites that offer a referral program, each individual recieves a url that they are allowed to post anywhere they like. For each person who they refer they recieve some sort of bonus or award. For a smaller amount of referrals, RPR members could recieve an accolade while larger milestones could merit perhaps an extra page for characters. This would not only be encouragement for members to gain items, but would also increase traffic on RPR.

This is an interesting idea. We do have a yearly raffle where members can win some rather nice prizes for simply posting a link to the RPR in various places around the internet.

I worry a little about year-round programs encouraging spam without a great deal of supervision, but it's probably surmountable.

I'm definitely interested in seeing where this goes, and will keep an eye on the thread. I can say that I've definitely helped recruit, but I use word-of-mouth with friends or PMs with others. I've brought about 7 other people onto the site, 4 of whom are fairly active still, and some of them have brought even more people onto the site. Still, there are people who have recruited more than me, and because they don't take pictures around Epic Week, they miss out on getting a chance at any awesome stuff.

I don't think we need it, but it could be nice for those who recruit large amounts of people individually.

See, the thing is, people have some incentive to invite their friends now -- so they can play together. There's zero incentive for people to signup friends who they know for sure will never log in again, and no incentive to register a bunch of fake accounts they just barely use - just enough to make sure that account qualified to not get deleted, meaning it would sit there squatting on a name forever that a real player might want.

A referral program immediately creates incentives for fake signups.

I could auto block the IPs of new sign ups, but it's a limited effectiveness tactic (many people have different IPs on their phones and desktops, for example,) would only slow down attempts at cheating by creating multiple accounts (IP addresses change frequently, and we'd want to release our block on them relatively quickly), and would punish people who live or play together (someone who invited a friend over and gets them to sign up while there there, for example -- a not uncommon circumstance. Siblings, roommates and spouses would also suffer.)

We'd have to carefully pick the criteria for counting a signup as real, and make it a really high one it wasn't worth simulating.

And I still worry about our links being spammed on other sites and getting our URL blacklisted as a source of spam.

That's a good enough reason for me to not have it. Though, for the sake of knowledge I'm still going to bring up my alternative. I'm not sure if it'd work or not anyway. Instead of a link for referals, could each account be given a code that they can send to a friend? This friend will enter it when asked in the creation of the account. This way the person has to sign up as per usual. It could decrease the amount of spam people send. You could also put a cap on the amount of times someone can recruit in a certain period of time, and even take action against members that have spammed (if a site admin from another site complains, not sure if that ever happens though). As for the IPs, you could always make it so that no more than one account can be referred from any given IP. This'll let people play as they have been, but you can't use the same devices over and over for rewards. This does, however mean they could refer to their phone at least once.

We could certainly do a code instead of a link, but it doesn't actually change too much -- the incentive to sign people up still stays the same, so there'd be nearly as much reason to spam the generic site link and mention that someone should enter the code (or more likely, username) when they click it.

I'm really trying to say: This has more complications to it than I'm ready to solve right now.

I've had tons of friends ask me to sign up for websites in the past I know I'd never end up using just for the sake of getting them a reward. This was with invite links and various other referral programs where you needed something personalized from a member.

I'm actually scared of this becoming a feature for the RPR because all it ended up doing on other sites was hog tons of usernames and turning it into a 'I'm better than you because I referred more people' contest, which was horribly degrading to the communities.

i'm not sure if this would be any benefit honestly? more people signing up for RPR would be great, but there's really no value in the extra numbers if those new accounts are just going to gather dust. imo it'd be better that people sign up because they have a genuine interest, as that way they'll be much more likely to take part in the community.

It would most likely require the new members to be active on the site for a certain period of time instead of just signing up, or an incentive could be given for how many times the referer's link is clicked (by an unique ip).
Kim, could you clarify what this means?

This is probably the only way in which this could work.

Maaaybe. Still spoofable!

Sure. I mean a situation where a member decided that they really wanted to be Epic and the only way for them to get it was via the referral program, so they took their referral link and posted it in the comments of blogs, on random forums, in the chat box of games, etc. etc., in the hopes that enough people will click it and maaaybe signup that they'll get a payout. This type of spam can get a site added to various blacklists, hurting our standing in search results when someone tries to google a forum RP site, or preventing non-spammy users from posting the link to their friends on a game or forum that's blacklisted our link.

Ouch! We don't want that!

Welp maybe my eccentric ideas should stay in my head and in my rps where they belong. Although, thank you for taking your time to discuss it everyone!