Filter out referrals that were never real
Count active referrals, not registered ones. Four queries that separate a genuine promoter from someone with a script.
Tagged “abuse”
4 entries
An admin view that shows you who is farming you
Four queries — earnings concentration, shared visitor keys, signup velocity, payout-to-activity ratio — that surface abuse without a fraud engine.
Cap what one visitor can earn you in a day
Pay each creative at most once per visitor per day. The ceiling becomes the number of creatives in rotation, which is a number you control.
A sliding-window rate limiter in MySQL
No Redis, no extension, no cron. One table and one function that caps any action per key within any window, and fails open so an outage never locks the site.