Problem with affiliate links

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The links to the Xbox store in the Xbox deals thread are returning an Error page with a body of "bad merchant" on linksynergy's site. The target URL is at the end of the redirect URL, so one can still manually get there by modifying the URL bar, but it's a bit of a pain. Don't know if that means something on Xbox's site is flagged wrong, or if it's something with incoming requests from CAG, but I saw people reporting the same thing with TrueAchievement's affiliate links. I wasn't experiencing the problem on TA, but I am here..
 
Microsoft cancelled their affiliate program. There's the answer! Links should work now.
 
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I'm still seeing the issue. In case it was a matter of the site caching recent forum pages, I went back to a page in the Xbox deals thread from January and tried a link there and it still returns a "bad merchant" page. Or will this only impact posts going forward?
 
If the links that were posted are just links to Microsoft website, and we did the automatic conversion on CAG, should now work fine. If the links that were posted were already affiliate links then those will never work again unless Microsoft comes back to that program.

Edit: I see that the links in the OP are direct affiliate links. 🥲
 
Outside of an old link to Major Nelson's blog, the links in the Xbox deals thread OP are to other posts within the thread.

Though the links I post are to xbox.com, not microsoft.com. Was just the handling of microsoft.com URLs changed?
 
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