How to Get Your Help Sources Rmarked
The Purpose of Rmarks
An Rmark is a bookmark that an Rbate Consumer account holds to an Rbate Help Source 
. Consumers can rate each of their Rmarks on either a 1-5 star or a not-helpful/helpful/very-helpful scale.
Consumers acquire Rmarks when they visit Help Sources on the Web, when they visit Rmark URLs that they see in printed publications or in material given or streamed to them by Helpers, use a mobile app, or when Helpers directly deposit Rmarks in Consumer Rbate accounts via email address, Facebook username, or a device tap.
Consumers can annotate, (re-)rate, and search their Rmarks to help them with their product and other research.
Consumers are also asked to cite the Rmarks they found helpful on a purchase when they use Rbate to claim a cash rebate for that purchase, which, as a Helper, can earn you income and a higher ranking in Rbate's Purchasing Help Search Engine. Consumers can also Rmark general topic (non-product-related) material when they find it interesting, and during rebate claims consumers can thank the Helpers who created this material by gifting them part of their rebates ("Nods").
Further, you can view the Rmark statistics of each of your Help Sources, which allows you to compare the reception of a work with that of other work by you and others in the product categories in which you work.
Ways to get a Source Rmarked
- If your Help Source is on a website you control, or if users of the source can be easily directed to such a webpage, add an Rmark button to the source's webpages,
-
If your Help Source is on paper, in a broadcast or stream, in-person, or online where an Rmark button can't be placed
(such as in a You Tube video, email, social media post, or a non-HTML app ), provide a short Rmark URL, or
- If you can obtain a person's email address or Facebook username, and permission from them to add an Rmark, or if you provide in-person help to someone with a device with either an NFC capability or a QR-code capability, you can add an Rmark for them.
The Rmark button for Help Sources on the Web
An Rmark button can be placed on any webpage — particulary those that can influence a purchase, but also pages that concern non-product-related topics which users may like to add to their Rmarks. (These "other topic" Rmarks can still earn you Rbate income via Nod and deferred fee payments from rebate payments that consumers receive.)
Visitors either click the button or make a gesture to both rate your material and add that material to their collection of Rmarks. Consumers can also enable auto-Rmarking, which automatically adds all visited material to their Rmarks.
You can place multiple Rmark buttons on a webpage, not only whhen you have a separate button for each user comment, but also more than one button with the same Rcode at different locations.
The Interactive Rmark button
Although Rmark buttons can be simple text or image links (see below), the interactive Rmark button allows users to rate and Rmark your material without leaving your page. Due to their handling of 3rd-party iframes, on certain Web browsers the interactive Rmark button will, when first clicked on a website, act as a static Rmark button. Interactive Rmark buttons will also behave statically if JavaScript (from Rbate) is blocked on your website.
An example of the interactive Rmark button is shown below.
The button is shown in a suitable size for touchscreen users, but you can make the button larger or smaller by changing the dimensions in the image style. The pop-up panel will remain the same size.
The example shows the display of a bubble that points out the first Rmark button on a page. This bubble is only shown if you have set the page's JavaScript variable rbateCallOut to true, and then is only displayed at most once to each browser on each website, and on no more than 5 websites for each browser. You should also set the rbateSitename variable to the name of your website, or you can instead set rbateCallOutText to the text you want displayed in the box. Alternatively, you can totally customize the appearance of the bubble by setting rbateCallOutHTML to a function that takes a pixel offset parameter that is zero if the bubble displays to the right of the button, and negative if it will display to the left. Show the standard version of this function.
By clicking the button above and rating this page you can see the special behaviour of the button when a user/browser has never before Rmarked and rated a webpage. The pop-up window explains the system, and offers options to register with Rbate and to enable auto-Rmarking.
If the user enables auto-Rmarking, Rmarks to articles (but not forum comments) are added as soon as they visit one of the article's webpages. The only indication that the article is being Rmarked is a pulsing of the button. Articles and comments can still be subsequently rated. Buttons change colour to reflect the user's rating.
Include the following HTML where you want the button to appear, adding the appropriate parameters to the link href.
<a target="_blank" href="https://rbate.com/rmark">
<img src="https://rbate.com/b/rmarkb.png"
style="height:15mm;border:0" alt="Rbate Rmark"
title="Click to rate and add an Rbate Rmark to this piece" />
</a>
<script src="https://rbate.com/b/rmark.js" defer="defer"></script>
Show the SSL version, which can be used on SSL pages.
The script tag can be safely moved to the page head section, and only needs to be included once, even if there are multiple Rmark buttons on the page. If you dynamically add Rmark button links to a page, call rbate.showRatings() to activate them as interactive Rmark buttons.
The script is loaded in deferred mode, meaning loading of your pages is never slowed, no matter how long it takes for a browser to fetch the script.
The interactive Rmark button is only enabled for about the 90% of users using modern browsers. Rmark buttons will remain ordinary image links for those using older browsers.
Rbate receives no information when an Rmark button is displayed. This means that Rbate only tracks your users when they add an Rmark either manually or automatically (if auto-Rmarking permission has been obtained). A user's Rmarks are only visible on the Rmarks Page of their Rbate account, or when the user makes a rebate claim. They are not used by Rbate for any other personalised purposes, including the display of advertising. Rbate users can permanently delete each of their Rmarks at any time.
Rating by Mouse/Touch Gestures
Unless you set the JavaScript variable disableRbateGestures on a webpage to true, visitors to that webpage
who have previously made an Rmark will be able to set ratings on interactive Rmark buttons by using mouse or touch gestures,
without having to locate and click the appropriate Rmark button.
A rating gesture is a pair of clicks or touches on a webpage, the second vertically above the first for a very-helpful rating, the second vertically below the first for a not-helpful rating, and the second directly to the left or right of the first for a helpful rating. Clicks longer than one second apart, within 10 pixels of each other, related to a drag action, or within active page parts such as textareas, are ignored.
Immediately after a suitable second click, the Rbate disc image will appear for two seconds under the mouse or finger, coloured to reflect the
chosen rating . If users click this image, a modal dialog will open that displays the Rmark they have just created or re-rated, allowing them to make edits
such as adding notes. If you've already added an Rmark to this browser, you can try the gestures on this page. These will operate on the sample Rmark button above.
If there are multiple interactive Rmark buttons on a page, a gesture will activate a rating on the closest button to the gesture point. For example, if a forum page has an Rmark button for each post, performing a gesture on a post's text should activate rating on the Rmark button placed somewhere in the markup of that post.
When a person makes their first Rmark by clicking an Rmark button and choosing a rating, a window pops-up that explains the Rmark system. This window includes information about Rmark gestures. You are however free to also explain Rmarks and gestures in other ways, such as on an FAQ page.
Rmark Button Link Parameters
While the above HTML is sufficient for many cases, it is preferable, and sometimes essential, to add one or more of the following parameters to the link URL of an Rmark Button, in the standard way. Please ensure that all characters that can't normally appear in URLs are encoded when they are present in URL parameters.
The greater the quantity and accuracy of the information you can provide in Rmark parameters, the more reliably Rmarks will be associated with the correct source, and the more likely it is for your source to both be found by consumers and earn income from bonuses and Nods.
You may be able to arrange for these parameters to be entered into and stored by your Content Managment System, which can then automatically render them into Rmark HTML. This saves you from entering these manually, on Rmarks, or by first registering the source in your Rbate account, or by using your Rbate account to update the fields of sources that have been automatically registered after being first Rmarked.
| PARAMETER NAME | PARAMETER VALUE | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| rcode |
The Rcode that Rbate has assigned to this source . If the rcode parameter is missing it can usually be inferred from URLs (as set in the first_page_url and url parameters below, as automatically read by the button JavaScript, or as sent by browsers in referer headers). However browser Rmark rating caching is more efficient when Rcodes are added to button URLs. You can use the Rcode of a media-group or choice-consultancy source in the Rmark buttons of any source that has a URL that is within the group's URL. That is, the URL of the source is the URL of the group with appended path segments. If you do this, Rbate will automatically create the source in your account when it's first Rmarked (if it doesn't already exist), linking it to its parent. This prevents you having to pre-register each of your sources with Rbate to obtain an Rcode to use in the button — you only need to pre-register groups such as websites and website-sections. You will receive an email when a source is automatically created, asking you to check and set its attributes, such as its source type, product category, and the list of products mentioned. It's also advisable to replace the group Rcode in the Rmark button with the newly-assigned source Rcode. Rcode parameters of Rmark buttons associated with user comments and comment threads must have the form "S-N", where S is either the Rcode of the Help Source to which the comments are attached or that of a parent group source, and N is a string unique to the comment. If the permalink of a source's comments is of the form PN, where P is the Comment Permalink Prefix that has been set for that source on the Sources Page, or if the same setting for a parent group source can be inherited, there is no need to also set the comment_url parameter on the comment's Rmark button. The parent ("S") part of a comment's Rcode can be blank if that Rcode can be determined from URLs. This allows Rmarking of comments on automatically-created sources in media-groups: set the Rcode parameter to "-N" and ensure that the Rmark button on the comment can associated with the URL of the child source to which the comment is attached (not the media-group's URL), preferably by setting one of the URL parameters in case JavaScriot is disabled. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| first_page_url |
The encoded canonical URL of the first page of this source. The URL field of any multi-page sources you create on the Sources Page of your Rbate Helper account should be set to the URL of that source's first page. This field, or the url parameter below, must be set if the Rmark button/link is placed on a page different from the URL of the source, such as on an index page of articles. first_page_url should always be set in preference to the url parameter, with the url parameter also set on multi-page content. If an Rmark button's first_page_url parameter is missing, and JavaScript is enabled, the Rmarked page is searched for a link or a tag with its rel atrribute set to "start", and if found, its href attribute is used. If no such tag is found on the page, Rbate uses various heuristics to infer the first page URL from the page's URL. |
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| url |
Even if you've set the first_page_url parameter, it's useful to also set the URL parameter to the encoded canonical URL of the current page so that a user can Rmark not just a particular multi-page source, but a specific page in this source. If an Rmark button's first_page_url parameter is missing,the page is searched for a canonical link tag. If this is not found, the URL is inferred through direct JavaScript inspection of the current location, with a final fallback to the refering page that most browsers send to Rbate. |
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| group_url |
If you put an Rmark button with a media-group or choice-consultancy Rcode on a page other than the home page of the group itself, with the anticipation of a source for the content on that page being automatically-created, you must also set the group_url parameter to the (cannonical) URL of the group home page. This group_url parameter can be removed if the Rcode of the button is updated to the Rcode assiged to the newly-created source. |
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| comment_url |
If this source is a forum comment, the permalink URL for this comment. This parameter can only be absent from the Rmark buttons/links of comments if the Comment Permalink Prefix field in the form on the Sources Page has been set for either the host source or one of its parent publication group sources (where the group permalink prefix is applicable for the host source's comments). When the prefix is set, the comment URL that Rbate will use is obtained by appending the comment ID suffix that you have appended to the rcode parameter. It is not necessary to set this parameter for the comment in question at the comment's permalink page itself, although if any other comments appear on this page, their comment_url parameters need to be properly set. |
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| handle |
The Rbate private source handle you'd like to use for this source when it is automatically created in your Rbate account. By default this will be the handle of the parent source with a unique numerical suffix. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| media_type |
The Rbate private source handle you'd like to use for this source when it is automatically created in your Rbate account. By default this will be the handle of the parent source with a unique numerical suffix.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| publication_date |
YYYY-MM-DD | expert_level |
Set to "Y" or "N" depending on whether the medium contains expert-level material. This allows expert shoppers to more easily find such material, and allows novices this product category to choose to avoid such material. By default inherits from any parent source. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| category |
Not required for sources you've manually registered in your Rbate Helper account. However for sources that are auto-registed when they are Rmarked, entering a category here avoids the need to set the source's category in your account later when the category differs from either the category of the source's parent source, or the default category set on your Rbate account. This parameter value should be a comma-separated Rbate product category sequence. You can either load the following HTML to select, display, and copy the correct parameter, which you can manually insert into Rmark buttons, or you can embed this HTML in your Content Management System forms to submit the selected category as the parameter specified in the fieldName option. To restrict the category selector to the categories with which you work, set the rootCategory option to a JavaScript array containg the category list displayed when this root category is selected.
<script>
var RbateCategorySelectorOptions = {
fieldName: 'rbateProductCategory',
rootCategory: [],
displaySelectedCategory: true
};
</script>
<style>
#rbateProductCategory_div select {
display: block;
width: 23em;
max-width: 95%;
}
</style>
<script src="https://rbate.com/assets/catsel.js">
</script>
<div id="rbateProductCategory_div"></div>
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| specific_category |
If you have sent the category parameter above, but would like to refine it further, set this parameter to a string which better describes the category of product with which your source deals. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| products_referenced |
Optionally list any products to which this source refers, or with which this source works, in the form
Please be careful to use the official product brand (preferred) or maker, and either the model-ID (preferred) or title. The model-ID/title box may be left blank if not applicable. Use brand "all" to specify all brands in the product category you specified above. Likewise, use model "all" to specify all models of the given brand in the given product category. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| not_charged |
Set to "Y" or "N" depending on whether the material is only accessible at this URL by paying customers. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| access_fee |
Set to the fee amount prefixed with a three-letter currency id. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| deferred_charge |
Set to "Y" if the access fee is not charged up-front, but you instead wish to recover it from the Rbate rebates the purchaser receives. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| contributors |
An optional comma-separated list of conributors to this source, either as an author, or another work created by you or others.
The parameter should be in the form |
You can also gather your own rating data by assigning a function to the rmarkCallback JavaScript variable. The first parameter of the function call will be a 0 to 5 rating of the item. Auto-Rmarked items will be zero-rated, not-helpful rated 1, helpful rated 3, and very-helpful rated 5. A second parameter will be the Rcode of the source that has been Rmarked or re-rated.
Static link Rmark Button
If you are unable or unwilling to run Rbate JavaScript on your page, you can omit the script tag to reduce the Rmark button to a normal text or image link.
The interactive aspects of the button will however be lost, including gestures, and Rmark creation will take place in a new browser window rather than in the background. You should still add appropriate parameters to the Rmark link URL.
Rmarking of User Submissions (Forum Posts, User contributions, and Comment Threads)
If a Help Source represents a discussion forum, or if a source otherwise allows user contributions to be attached to it, you can make it possible for your users to Rmark individual user submissions or threads of such submissions, rather than just the source as a whole. Rebate claimers can cite these submissions as helpful, earning you income, which at your discretion you can share with your user-contributors. The number of Rmarked comments is displayed in a Sources table column.
To make Rmarking of individual user comments possible, each comment and/or comment-thread needs to have its own permalink URL, at which the only significant content is preferably the comment or thread in question. (Permalinks of individual comments provided to Rbate shouldn't be page anchors.) As well as permalinks to individual user contributions, you can provide separate permalinks to material that several users may have contributed to, for example a review that displays average user ratings. The title of the page to which a permalink points, or the heading on this page, can be either the title of the article or thread to which the comment belongs, or the title of the comment itself.
The permalink URL of a comment needs to be either provided in the comment_url parameter of the comment's Rmark button, or, if the permalink for all comments on a source has a fixed prefix followed by a comment identifier, this prefix set in either the source's Comment Permalink Prefix field, or the same field in a parent media group source. This last option allows the permalink to be inherited by automatically-created sources, but only works if all sources in the parent group share the same comment URL prefix.
The rcode parameter on comment Rmark buttons shouuld be set to the Rcode of the source that holds the comments, followed by a dash and the comment's unique ID. The comment_url parameter must be set if the comment's permalink URL does not end in this unique ID. The source Rcode can be blank if it can be inferred from URLs (that is, the comment Rcode can have a leading dash). Except on the comment's or thread's own page, set the Rmark url and first_page_url parameters to that of the source rather than that of the comment or thread.
If a forum or other publication has a number of subsections that cover different topics, tags, product categories, or products, it's worth creating a separate source for each of these subsections, generating separate Rcodes and search engine listings. Use these section Rcodes in Rmark buttons on comments and threads in the corresponding sections, as well as on the section index pages themselves. Be sure to set the correct Comment Permalink Prefix and Product Category on these sources. To provide you with aggregate statistics, you can also set the Parent Source to a source that represents the forum or publication as a whole.
Because there is usually more that one comment on a page, user comments are never automatically Rmarked — users must manually rate them by either clicking the post's Rmark button, or by making a rating gesture on the submission's text. Gestures are associated with the button that has the deepest common DOM ancestor with the clicked page element.
Whenever Rbate pays you, we give you a breakdown of the earnings for each Rcode suffix (comment and/or thread). This can help you determine any payment distribution. You will have to do your own internal distribution of earnings of sources that contain the aggregated contributions of more than one of your users.
Some rules:
- You cannot encourage users to Rmark comments/threads, unless you're telling them to do so if they found the comment/thread helpful.
- You must make a strong attempt to prevent users from Rmarking their own comments, preferably by not rendering Rmark buttons on these comments. (Use a secondary cookie that prevents this even when users are not logged-in to your site.)
- Your forum rules must disallow conspiracies to fraudlently Rmark posts, and you must monitor comments to ensure that such collusion is not discussed and is suitably punished.
- You mustn't give users any information about bonus offers.
Rmark URLs and Images for Off-Web Help Sources
If one of your Help Sources is presented on paper, in a broadcast or stream, in a mobile app, in a social medial post or video description, or if the help is provided personally and you can't reliably obtain the consumer's email address or deploy NFC tags, you allow your source to be Rmarked by providing your users with a short web address (URL) that they can enter into a Web browser. The URL can be rendered as, or accompanied by, a QR Code image that navigates to that URL when the image is held under a smartphone camera running a QR reader app (e.g. the standard camera app in iOS11+). For example you can add an Rmark link to the description of a YouTube video Help Source, plus display a QR code in the video itself, continuously in a corner and/or full-screen at the end.
The Rmark URLs are grab.as/[rcode] or clip.as/[rcode] (your choice), where [rcode] is the Rcode Rbate has assigned
either this source or a parent source of this source . The Rcode of a source is displayed on the Sources Page of your Rbate Helper Acccount,
and is returned when you use the API
to have your CMS automatically create a source before you publish an item.
If your source has its own webpage, on which you can place an Rmark button, you can instead direct users to this page to get the source Rmarked (and possibly auto-created).
For example, a broadcast may point users to the program's website, where users can find a page dedicated to that episode or story.
A source such as a salesperson can either place a grab.as URL and image on their business card or invoice, or you can give each salesperson a dedicated webpage that contains an Rmark button, to which customers can be directed.
A printed story can direct readers to its online version. However if the online version is only made available after a delay, you can allow all readers to Rmark the story by putting a short Rmark URL at its end, adding the URL to the source record at a later time. You can do the same if an online story is only viewable by subscribers, or you can place an Rmark button on the story-stub or subscription-request page that non-subscribers will see.
The optional 21x21 element QR code image should be at least 15mm x 15mm when printed so that it can be read by fixed-focus cameras, but can be made smaller once auto-focusing phone cameras become more common.
You can download QR Rmark PNG images via either the links displayed on the Sources Page of your Rbate account or by using the URL
http://rbate.com/helpers/source_qr_code
adding the following parameters in the standard way:
| PARAMETER NAME | PARAMETER VALUE |
|---|---|
| key |
Your API key. Log-in to see. |
| rcode |
The Rcode that Rbate has assigned this source . |
| type |
"clip" or "grab" (the default). |
| zoom |
Image zoom factor. Default is 2 (42px x 42px). Maximum is 26. |
Rmarking With Email Addresses
Beside Rmark buttons and URLs, another way to get a Help Source Rmarked is to obtain the visitor's email address (for existing holders of an Rbate Consumer Account, this must be the address they used for their account), which you either enter on the Add Rmark Page, or submit to Rbate using the API described below.
You can also designate a deferred fee, allowing users to access your source without the need to arrange an up-front fee or subscription, but allowing you to get paid for that access from any rebate that the user subsequently receives.
To programatically add an Rmark you must POST the following parameters to
http://rbate.com/helpers/add_rmark
| PARAMETER NAME | REQUIRED? | PARAMETER VALUE | ||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| key | Y | Your API key. Log-in to see. | ||||||||||||||||
| rcode | Y | The Rcode of the source to be Rmarked, as displayed in the table on the Sources Page. | ||||||||||||||||
| Y | The email address of the user. You should ask the user to enter the email address of their Rbate Consumer Account, or, if they do not yet have such an account, the email address they'd like to use for that account. The user will then be emailed and given the option to create that account. | |||||||||||||||||
| deferred_fee | N | A decimal number which represents the deferred fee you wish to charge for access to this material or service. A deferred fee will only be registered if you have checked the "Deferred" box on the "Service Fee" line of the source in question (on the Sources Page). | ||||||||||||||||
| fee_currency | N |
A three-letter string that represents the currency of the deferred fee. The following are valid:
|
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| notes | N | An HTML string of up to 10240 characters that represents notes to be attached to the Rmark. |
A status code of 200 is returned if the Rmark was sucessfully added, otherwise a different status code is returned with an error message as the response body. The error mesasge Invalid email address is returned if the email parameter is not in valid email address format.
Using NFC to give Rmarks to customers carrying mobile devices
You can give those you help in person an Rmark to your source (which you can choose to be a staff member, department, location, region, or organization) by having your staff wear NFC wristbands encoded with an Rmark short URL. The staff member asks customers who have been helped to hover their mobile device over the band, which on NFC-capable devices will automatically give the customer an Rmark to that source. A backup for customers without such devices is to give them the Rmark short URL in for form of a QR-code (on the wristband or elsewhere), on a business card, invoice, or poster, or to ask for their email address.
Staff members with access to a smartphone or tablet can use it to write notes for the customer, which will be attached to their Rmark given to the customer when this device is brought close to the customer's device. This is useful for both the customer's decision-making, and for identifying the information they got from you when the come to cite their helpful sources of advice during a rebate claim.