There are many reasons for wanting to do this.

1) You simply don’t wish to let people know that you have an affiliate program – maybe it is so that you don’t want to confuse the mom-and-pop niche that you are in with crazy words like “Affiliate” and “Commission”

2) You deliberately want to disable certain users from using the affiliate link, and not award them any commissions, even though they know what that link is.

3) You are using a 3rd party affiliate service – like ClickBank – and don’t want to use DAP’s built-in affiliate program.

At this time, you cannot really do (2). There is no way to stop DAP from tracking an affiliate’s referrals and not tracking their earnings. Only work-around right now, is to simply not pay them at all, for whatever reason (you better have a very good reason, if not it could be legal trouble for you).

Here’s how you can do (1) – which essentially works for (3) also.

A) If you are using the default dap/index.php as your members’ home page, then all you have to do is to go to…

Setup > Config > Advanced > “Should Affiliate Section be displayed on User `Home` Page? (If using ClickBank, set this to `N`)”

And set it to “N” (for “No”).

That will essentially “hide” the affiliate section from showing up on the default DAP home page.

B) If you are not using the default dap/index.php, and are putting all of the DAP member content (like User Profile, User Links, Affiliate Details) etc right into your WordPress blog, then just skip the Affiliate Details part, and don’t create a custom page for Affiliates within your blog. If you don’t create the page, then they won’t see it, that’s all.

NOTE: If you don’t want anyone to get any commissions, also make sure that you don’t set up any commissions on the “Affiliates > Set Commissions” page.

So basically, in both (A) and (B), you are essentially “hiding” the affiliate program details, and not really disabling it.

In a future version of DAP, we will have the ability to selectively turn off an individual’s ability to use their affiliate link, so DAP will completely ignore all referrals from the affiliate, and won’t track anything from them.