saving a variable- need some help

Anon

I have people being sent to my site from other sites. When these people sign up for an account on my site I need to know which person referred them.

On the referring sites, the links look like this:
mydomain.com/?AGENT_ID=XXX

If they click to sign up directly from the front page, I can add a reference variable to the link and grab the ID on the sign-up page. The problem is that i lose this ID if they go to any other pages on my site before creating their account.

I know I can add a string to the end of all the links in my site to get this to work, but i definitely don't want to do that. Does anyone have any other ideas or suggestions?

Thanks in advance,
Mike Dill

brandonschnell

you could try to set a cookie.

when the user does actually register then clear the cookie and set it to indicate that the user is already registered.

Anon

thanks brandon!

here's how i did it...

my agents have links to my site that look like this...
www.mysite.com?AGENT_ID=XXX

when a user comes to my front page, i write a cookie based on the referer ID:

if($AGENT_ID) {
setcookie("agentid", $AGENT_ID, mktime(18,30,0,5,12,2020));

then, on the account sign-up page i read the cookie and set the agent ID:
if(isset($agentid)) $AGENT_ID = $agentid;

thanks again for the idea,
mike