Hi!
I’ve had the same complaint from customers two days in a row (and I recently upgraded the plugin). They say their link is expiring in the evening well before the end of the day. In my general WP settings, I have time set to New York, but it seems like maybe Affiliates Pro is looking at the Universal Time instead. How can I update this to ensure it schedules expirations by EST, or any other time?
I couldn’t find anything in the documentation, but if I missed it, just send me the link.
Thanks!
-Erica
You’re welcome Erica.
We are currently reviewing the existing implementation and will proceed accordingly to adjust affiliate timezone with the site timezone.
Kind regards,
George
Hi Erica,
You’re welcome, as it seems the validity of the affiliate is indeed affected by the timezone and this is more obvious in your case for this specific timeframe since you are expecting the affiliate to be active only for one day. We will further review the affiliate validity comparison and adjust the implementation accordingly.
In the meantime and on your side perhaps it would make sense if you keep your affiliates active for two days instead of one so that the time difference is covered and the affiliates are kept active within your timeframe.
Kind regards,
George
The affiliates are active for weeks. As fundraisers, they usually do one last push on the last day that their link is live. It seems that if the buyer is on the west coast, it’s deactivated around 4pm and they can’t use it and that upsets the fundraisers since they missed out on that purchase. So, I can definitely keep the link live an extra day. We just need to remember to deactivate it manually if we do a payout before it truly expires. It would be great if the expiration could follow a specific time though – GMT or EST.
Thanks again!
Hi Erica,
I misunderstood your topic and thought you were referring to cookies.
Please allow me to run a couple of additional tests to make sure if WP timezone is affecting the validity of an affiliate link. Normally the conditional check whether an affiliate is active or not compares the dates in the same zone and is independent of the WP timezone, but I’ll check whether it is affected in a different spot.
Kind regards,
George
Thanks so much! I appreciate that. Have a great day!
Hi George! My links expire by “Session” rather than in 1 day. I can easily switch between affiliate links with no cookie issues.
To be clear, the affiliate link is becoming inactive before midnight on the last day of their fundraiser. When the link becomes inactive, it directs to a page that says “This fundraiser is over” (see link below). I confirmed with the one person that it’s what she saw last 9pm. So, the cookie is working correctly. It just seems that the link is changing to “inactive” before midnight.
Here’s an inactive link, which will direct you to the page the affiliate was seeing hours before they should have: https://fundraising.happyvalleysoupcompany.com/?fund=166
Hope that’s more helpful info. 🙂
Hi Erica,
Welcome back to our support forum.
I would say that probably they have miscalculated the expiration time of the cookie or cleared the browser history/memory without noticing. Even though on Chrome cookies are added according to the UTC timezone and on Firefox the timezone is the local one the expiration date/time for one day is the creation date/time plus 1 day.
For example if you visit one of your affiliate links on Firefox what are the data you get for your cookie created?
On my test installation a cookie expiring in one day looks like this:
– https://ibb.co/qFzxsXV
In order to check the cookie details, after visiting the affiliate URL, right click anywhere on the page, click on Inspect, go to Storage tab and click on the wp_affiliates cookie.
Kind regards,
George