To be a second devils advocate:
Those of us with discount code sites know that one of our biggest bug-bears is that we spend hours (and sometimes many hours) sourcing discount codes, only to have every other tom, dick and harry steal that code and offer it to their users for a few seconds work.
While at the moment our site shows all of the codes, I
am in the middle of recreating the site to be a 'click here to reveal the code' site simply to make the code stealers life that little bit more difficult (and certainly to try and prevent the automated crawlers which are a real pain in the proverbial - not only do they steal your codes they consume bandwidth like it is going out of fashion too - real thanks to the ones who let their robots get stuck in our tell a friend page until it has shown 500 times!!)|
Fortunately some networks like Linkshare, Webgains and Paid on Results and some enlightened merchants like
Starblu are now helping to resolve this issue.
I know this is a little bit, chicken and egg but if networks and merchants policed stolen codes more, then voucher sites would not need to work so hard to hide the voucher code in the first place.
While I would not condone people who advertise codes for merchants who never have one, the situation is more complicated where you have merchants who stop and start codes at short notice where it is not always possible to remove a code from the site the moment the code is withdrawn.
Before anyone says 'forced click' - is this any more of a forced click than a content site that has a link saying 'click here for more info' when in reality all that link does is take the user to the merchant site, (and plant a cookie in the process).