Eh... weird question, but what do you do with your affiliates when your board's link changes and/or you've moved your board to an entirely new hoster? And by what do you do with them, I don't mean like if you take them with you or not but more along the lines of should you inform them that the link has changed? or do you let them keep linking to the old forum?
Assuming that the old site exists, I just toss up a redirect on it. This way, I don't have to update links across multiple sites and directories and people who do somehow inadvertently end up on the old site have the page refresh to the new. I'd probably drop a line to affiliates, but I wouldn't worry too much about advertisements and the like. Quick, easy, simple.
I've seen my fellow affiliates message me on the affiliation thread and let us know the link has changed, and they took us over. I thought that was incredibly polite and fair of them - I'd say do that. On the other hand, it's also a perfect chance to shake off the affiliates who don't give you any traffic that have been on your board for months/years.
We have a nice little section in our apps that says "How did you find us?" and most of them are completely honest. We had someone find us through Google. Like, not joking. They found us through Google. So when they list the affiliate name we keep in mind we get members from there, and then when it comes time to clean affiliates (which is like, once a month), I just look for the ones that are offline or don't have our button up on the front page anymore. If they moved it to another page that is hidden, I let them know that unless our button is returned to the front of the forum (since that is the point of affiliates) we are going to remove their button until they let us know. I will check back once to see if they did, and if not, we leave their button off permanently. I also make sure to let affiliates know when our button is updated, or if we ever move hosts (which we probably won't anytime soon), I will let them know the updated information so they can copy/paste instead of just looking for the link itself to change. Makes it a helluva lot easier, let me tell you.
We have that little section too and it happens quite frequently in fact! Google is our main referrer, though sometimes I think people write Google when they don't want to say where they are coming from.
