Yes, please knock off the insults.
As far as CP's and the mods' endorsements of this thread, it's not really so much an endorsement as a trial tolerance.
In my personal opinion, if someone benefits off the back of someone else's work then they have an obligation.. websites work to gain eyeballs, if someone tries to benefit from those eyeballs they pay the website to advertise.
So normally people have to pay to advertise.. however we established the power ring to try and let people promote their businesses while having the benefit go back to the community in the form of discounts for CP members.
This doesn't really fit that mold though, since there's no special discount for CP members. So someone benefits from the referrals while not any special benefit for CP members. However it does put all the deals into one place, so we figured to let this continue as it does give that benefit to CP members. And to the couple of mods/writers who benefited from gift coupons from GFG
Anyway, just wanted to clarify our position.. initially we saw potential issues in both fairness and also with potential abuse (in that there'd be a dozen threads each with people promoting their own referral links), but felt there could be enough benefit to the community to let it continue.