Referrer function could use some love

[opentype]

An affiliate program has a lot of potential to grow a community and increase the income, since you get your members to advertise your site and your products. The current implementation of the Commerce referrer function is too limited though at the moment. Maybe it can be improved someday. 

This is how most site-based affiliate system I use work nowadays:

1. They are HTTP-referrer based. 

The affiliate partner registers his site(s) and confirms his ownership, e.g. by uploading a special file via FTP. After that, all incoming links from those site are automatically tracked through the HTTP referrer. No special URLs necessary. The current Commerce implementation only allows one homepage link and nothing else. You can’t point the affiliate links to certain forum posts, Commerce products or whatever. That doesn’t really invite users to spread the links. 

2. Query string for social media

In addition to the automatic tracking, affiliate partners can usually set up a query string to be used on Twitter, Facebook, in emails and so on. You just add something like ?refby=[affiliate_ID] to any URL and it will be tracked for the affiliate program. That too encourages users to spread links to your site. But currently only the homepage link can be shared. 

[Fosters]

You could also give https://invisioncommunity.com/files/file/8360-referrals/ a try
It works side by side with the commerce referrals and enhances them;)

[Interferon]

The system should use an argument in the URL that simply indicates the user ID. All social share links should automatically use this. We have so much content and if people actually had a motivation to share it on social media we would gain a ton of new traffic.

You want it to work as easily as possible, with no effort required from the user.

My users would love to share a bunch of links on our site, get a little account credit, and use it to buy more stuff.

[Platinumwealth.co.za]

This is a major missing feature! 
We had in on both myBB and phpBB.