Affiliate with TCoD

Affiliation is when two websites mutually agree on linking to one another, usually in a place specially denoted as a list of affiliates.

Affiliation Requirements

In order to affiliate with The Cave of Dragonflies and appear on that lovely list, your website will need to meet several conditions. If you're too lazy to read all this text, there is a short version in list format, but I don't recommend this as it won't give you a full understanding of what your website needs to have to get accepted.

The Kind of Thing I'm Looking For

Well, in one sentence, I'm looking for Pokémon websites in English.

As a policy, I do not affiliate with forums, sorry; I want to look at actual content that you created and people can read or look at and not at something people have to actively participate in to enjoy or is a product of the community more than of yourself. And no, I will not make a special exception for you and your RPG you worked so hard on. Call it harsh if you like, but this is set in stone. No forums, oekakis, RPGs or whatever else whose primary function is to have people register on it and then write their own content. Of course, you can have a website with content as well as an accompanying forum/RPG/oekaki and that obviously won't hurt you.

It must also be a Pokémon website or at least contain quite a bit of Pokémon-related content - if it contains stuff about other fandoms unrelated to Pokémon, that content will be entirely ignored when I look over the site. General non-fandom-specific content will count, but if the site as a whole doesn't have enough Pokémon content to be rightfully called a Pokémon site, I'm still not affiliating with it.

And finally, yes, I'm afraid it must be in English - there is nothing wrong with sites in other languages, but even if most of the visitors to your site know English, only a fraction of mine will know Dutch/German/French/Spanish/Italian/whatever, and I think it's better to let people rest assured that if they click a link to one of my affiliates, they'll understand the content. Besides, I'd never be able to read the content on the site either, so it would be kind of hard for me to evaluate the quality of the site.

Also, no pornographic, overly violent, hateful, prejudiced or stolen content. It can contain non-pornographic (i.e. not specifically created to induce sexual arousal) R-rated fanfiction or artistic nudity if all such material has appropriate warnings near it and there is something that younger viewers can look at too, but any character bashing, racism, flaming, prejudice or plagiarism is absolutely out of the picture.

I don't care what kind of site it is otherwise. It can be fan art, fan fiction, game information, anime information, original games... anything, really.

General Quality Requirements

Well, first of all, my website tips are pretty much required reading. This is important because when I affiliate with you I consider it to be, in a way, endorsing or approving of your site, and in general I want to promote good website quality in the Pokémon fandom, hence why those website tips exist at all. You'll get away with breaking one or two, sure, but when I respond to your affiliation e-mail I will most likely point them out and expect you to fix them.

The very most important website tip here is not to open your site, or at least not try to advertise it or affiliate with people, until there actually is something on it. I'm not affiliating with a website that consists of a front page, about a hundred words briefly describing each generation of Pokémon games, that boring old copy-paste "Skateboarding Pikachu" game and a link to a dead forum. You can't have a good website unless it's got some real content on it that somebody would actually be interested in looking at (interesting and/or useful, preferrably interesting). My site (which was pretty darned n00by back in the day) wasn't even put on the Internet until I had already created some twenty pages of content. It doesn't have to have any particular number of pages, but just put something on there worth seeing.

Misinformation is also important to avoid; I will brutally point out everything I can find wrong with the information on your site and if you generally seem not to be bothered to get things right I will probably refuse affiliation. Even if they're minor enough for me to figure they don't matter that much, I'll point them out in my response to your affiliation e-mail.

Other things from the website tips in particular to watch out for are spelling and grammar, especially so the spelling of Pokémon names and including capitalizations, punctuation and correct use of apostrophes. Pet peeves to the max. You'll get away with a mistake here and there, but if you put "it's" instead of "its" every single time it appears, capitalize or misspell every other word and apply commas with a salt shaker, I will refuse to affiliate. The basic rules really aren't that hard to learn. (Also, if your affiliation requirements say "Must have good spelling and grammer", you are a hypocrite, even if your spelling is good otherwise.)

Everything else from the website tips also applies to varying degrees. I don't mind unnecessary splash pages that much (although they are annoying), you'll probably pass if you have a lot of informative content even if it isn't overly original, and the name of your site will never determine whether I'll affiliate with it or not, but the rest of the website tips should pretty much be followed religiously.

Layouts only factor in through the professionalism angle, which is the last big point when it comes to general quality. All I want in terms of layouts is that the site doesn't hurt my eyes, works at least in Internet Explorer and Firefox, looks clean and consistent, is easily navigated and doesn't take several centuries to load. Also into the professionalism part is maybe my unfairest affiliation requirement, which is decent writing. Yes, I know a lot of you are younger kids and don't have the best writing abilities in the world, or maybe you're just not much of a writer in general, but I really want the content on my affiliates to be reasonably well written. I'm not asking for something that would be published in a book, but if the sections are all horribly choppy block paragraphs containing a lot of exclamation marks... argh.

Personal Bias

How do you really get me on your side, so to speak? General quality as described above won't make me like your site, and although if you've got that all perfect and a lot of content to go with it I'll probably agree to affiliate, I'll be considerably more willing to look past some flaws if you've managed to make me really want to affiliate with you.

The key point in making me like your site is originality. I want to see something interesting that I've never seen before, something I couldn't find on any other Pokémon website, or something done drastically better than on any other Pokémon website. Having just one section that's completely unique makes a huge difference, and if most of your sections are original it's quick to win me over.

Also important is effort. You may notice that I have no requirements for numbers of hits or pages. I'll affiliate with new, small sites, but only if I can clearly see that you've poured your heart and soul into what is there (and by the way, thinking up something original shows a lot more effort than just having the same sections as everybody else does, so this connects with the point above). The same applies to not-so-new and not-so-small sites too: if everything on the site seems to be half-hearted, all the pages only maybe a hundred words long, or there are lots of mistakes or outdated information that you haven't bothered to fix, or if most of the sections seem to be composed of content from somewhere else (even if credit has been given and permission obtained for its usage), I won't affiliate with you even if you've got a very popular or large site. Again, to me, affiliation is kind of like mutual endorsement, and I don't approve of lazy webmastering.

Lastly, it's you. I'll like your site more if you come across as an intelligent, dedicated and helpful person with a sense of humour - this will be judged from your affiliation e-mail as well as the content of your site and "About Me" section if any. It is a turn-off if you seem to be overly full of yourself, immature or a general jerk. It may seem a bit harsh to judge your character instead of the site, but if I really don't like you I'd just really hate the idea of promoting your website. Sorry.

The Short Version

I don't really approve of being too lazy to read the full explanation, but if all the text is scaring you or you're in a hurry or if you've read it and would like to refresh your memory with a simple checklist before applying, here's the basic stuff condensed into a list:

No forums/oekakis/RPGs.
Must be a Pokémon site.
Must be in English.
No porn, gore, prejudice, racism, flaming, bashing or plagiarism.
There has to be some actual content worth seeing on the site.
Generally follow my Website Tips, especially the parts about misinformation, spelling/grammar and website annoyances.
No layouts that make my eyes bleed, only work in Internet Explorer, are impossible to navigate, take too long to load or are terribly inconsistent.
No terribly choppy writing.
Try to be original.
Put some real thought and effort into it instead of just doing it for quick popularity.
Be at least halfway likeable as a person.

See? Doesn't it seem such a lot simpler now?

Get Affiliated

Before you apply for affiliation, please keep the following in mind:

I am picky. I deny most affiliation requests I get, and all of them think their sites are wonderful and comply with all the rules (or well, presumably they do). I don't affiliate for hits; I don't want to have as many popular affiliates as possible so my site can be more popular. I affiliate because I approve of the general promotion of good websites, and thus I make it a policy only to affiliate with good websites. If I deny, please don't think I hate you or something.
To affiliate, you need to ask me first and I need to accept it. You can not just paste my button under your affiliates. Affiliates are not just cool sites you link to. Affiliation is always mutual. I link to you and you link to me, because we both like one another's websites.
You have to include the URL to your website. Come on, how am I supposed to affiliate with you if you didn't give me a link?
Please know what my site is called. No, you can not affiliate with "Dragonflycave", because there is NO SUCH WEBSITE. I've said yes to these in the past and let people go with "It's called The Cave of Dragonflies" noted at the top of the reply, but I'm really just getting fed up with it. If you can't read the name on my top banner, you're not the kind of person I want to affiliate with. And if you must shorten the name of the site on an affiliate bar, make it into "TCoD", which is the only officially endorsed abbreviation.
I'd very much prefer not getting some mass-produced affiliation e-mail that you send to all twenty webmasters of your favorite websites. In other words, it is a severe turn-off if upon my reply, you respond with, "Um, what's your site again? I sent this e-mail to a bunch of people and don't remember which site is which." In fact I'll get a little suspicious if all references to the site are sneakily worded as "your website" rather than "The Cave of Dragonflies", and any "if applicable" stuff is just a surefire way to tick me off. If you're not willing to take the time to read my affiliation rules and then write an e-mail to me for applying, I don't want to affiliate with you.

Then you can go ahead and contact me. You should send me an e-mail when you want to request affiliation; if you send me a PM at some forum or an IM or something, I'm almost guaranteed to end up forgetting about it.

After Applying

Well, just wait. Be patient. I may, if I'm feeling lazy when I read your e-mail, star it for a later time, and if this happens I may not look at it for a while, but once in a while I take a spurt of going through all my starred mail and then I'll get to it. Odds are you won't need to submit the affiliation request again.

When I do respond to it, I will basically go through your whole site and try to read every page although if you have a lot of parallel sections (e.g. episode guides) I might just read a couple of those as a sample. I'll make a mental note of what's good and bad about the site (see above for what goes on this list) and generally make up my mind somewhere along the way, but I still finish reading all the sections on your menu. Finally I will compose a reply, which will either accept or reject your site, and send it to you.

If I Reject

I consider it your right to know exactly why I reject you if I do, so I will always list the things that made me decide not to affiliate with you. I'll generally explain it as thoroughly and helpfully as I can, unless you managed to tick me off to a very great extent, which generally only happens if you've been shamelessly stealing content or images. You should read the reply carefully and make good note of it; even if it hurts to have your site rejected, I guarantee that it will help you in the long run to work on what I tell you to, and that is the reason I bother to detail why I rejected you. It's all done to help your site and not because I personally have anything against you. If you strongly disagree with what I say in principle, of course, you have every right to do so, and may argue your case if you feel like it or just decide I'm not worth the bother.

You are free to ask for affiliation again whenever you like as long as you've very visibly improved the site since I last rejected you. See the FAQ entry on the subject.

If I Accept

Well, congratulations. I'll send you a reply saying you're accepted. If something about the site really bothered me, I'll tell you that as well and expect you to fix it if it's serious (such as misinformation). I'll put up your button on my affiliate list, which is randomized every time somebody views the page, so you might appear anywhere on the list; upon receiving my reply, you should put my site on your affiliate list however you happen to organize it.

I generally go through all my affiliates periodically and remove all those that are either down or don't appear to have been updated for more than three months. If I've taken your site off the affiliate list and you revive it or it comes back up, by all means tell me and I'll put it back on the list. You are, of course, also free to just remove my button and continue on your merry way without being affiliated with me.

I might also do this if changes to your site lead to it no longer fulfilling some of the other affiliation requirements, such as if you suddenly remove all your Pokémon content and turn it into a site about something else, if you make it into a hentai site, if you suddenly turn into a jerk or steal content, if you take down my button for no reason, etc. Unlike some people I do regularly visit all of my affiliates just to see how they're doing, so don't think I'll just never notice.

Page last modified September 06 2008 at 16:11 GMT