Articles
Field notes on tracking, fraud & growth
How server-side attribution actually works, written by the team building it. New here? Start with the docs or see pricing.
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Designing a Viral Referral Contest That Converts
How to build a referral contest with points, leaderboards, and halving points up the tree so it rewards real reach instead of self-dealing chains and bots.
Detecting Fake Signups: Risk Scoring for Referrals
How to catch fake referral signups with disposable-email checks, normalized-email dedup, device-fingerprint reuse, IP bursts, and silent server-side risk scoring.
Sub-10ms Affiliate Redirects at the Edge: Architecture
A deep dive into how Argus Grape serves affiliate redirects in under 10ms at the edge using Go, Redis, an async stream writer, and a fail-open design.
Idempotent Conversion Webhooks That Reject Fraud
How to design conversion webhooks for affiliate programs: dedup on event id, signature verification, and auto-rejecting fraud before it earns a commission.
Modeling Referral Trees With PostgreSQL ltree
How Argus Grape models multi-level referral trees with PostgreSQL ltree: ancestor queries via the @> operator, GIST indexes, and fast upline and downline lookups.
Multi-Level Affiliate Commissions Explained
How multi-level affiliate commissions work: level splits, why commissions flow up a referral tree, and how to model them safely without runaway payouts or fraud.
Cookieless Attribution With a Server-Issued Click ID
How Argus Grape issues argus_cid at the edge and forwards it to checkout for privacy-friendly, ad-blocker-proof affiliate attribution that survives cookie loss.
How Affiliate Click Fraud Works (And How to Kill It Quietly)
A technical breakdown of bots, click farms, and cookie stuffing in affiliate programs, plus how silent shadow-bans neutralize fraud without tipping off the people running it.
Server-Side vs Client-Side Affiliate Tracking
Why server-side affiliate tracking beats client-side pixels on accuracy, ad-blockers, and fraud — and how edge redirects and signed webhooks close the gaps.