Is This Possible? Different referrers, different skins

[The Equivocate]

I'm opening a forum that will act as the "central" forum for a bunch of different sites. As I don't own most of these other sites, we're going to split the revenue based on what sites are referring. Ideally, I'd like to have different preset referrers/domains. Then, based on where the visitor comes from, they get the skin branded with that referrer/domain.

However, this only is half the idea, because I also need a way to associate returning members/posters with where they came from. So, if Visitor comes from Affliliate A and signs up, and then a few weeks later they visit the forums from Aff. B, Aff A still gets the credit for the page views (and then the ensuing ad revenue). The ads themselves seem easy to do as each affiliate will have their own skin anyways, so just put the adcode associated with that affiliate in that specific skin.

The only question I have is how to force a skin on a user based on their referrer, and force them to keep it. That would be the easy way, but I'd also like to be able to sort members by referrers. Possibly put them in groups, but then if I have 20 different regular member groups, it's going to get annoying, especially with permission-based adjustments.

Basically I want to make sure each referring affiliate is getting the credit and getting their share of the profits based on how much traffic they're sending.

[noppid]

use the styleid of the referrer maybe in their incoming links for starters maybe. Of course styles have to be selectable and that means if one is nice, people are gonna switch.

You can add a variable to the links at the referrer sites and process it in a hook too. Passing the style and referrer is easy. It's your post processing that is gonna be key.

Assuming they are gonna have to register the first time, you can grab the referrer var and process in register.php hooks to put them in a group.

I'm thinking out loud. I hope it sounds as good on paper.

[The Equivocate]

I'll have to look into that.. but as I said, I wish I didn't have to have usergroups for each referrer, but that looks like the best/easiest option.

Any other ideas anyone?

[The Equivocate]

Thought I'd bump this as I'm still looking for ways to do this. Does anyone else have some ideas of what to do and how I can implement it?

[Dismounted]

Yes, this is possible. Do you have knowledge of PHP?

[The Equivocate]

Eh, not too much... enough to get me by when it comes to making minor modifications to my forums. I was hoping there were some previous stuff out there that could help me out with this.

[Dismounted]

You would have to catch the referrer at global_start or similar and change the styleid so it loads a different style.

[The Equivocate]

Originally Posted by Dismounted

You would have to catch the referrer at global_start or similar and change the styleid so it loads a different style.

Okay, so this would display the skin based on where they just came from. However, what if they don't register right away? Although I guess I *could* force guests to register but that would probably harm this particular forum.

The other problem is I don't want to have to put them into specific usergroups, but again that's probably the easiest option. I'm not sure, but is it possible to force specific skins on specific usergroups?