I contract for a site where I do chats. There was a time like two years ago that I made a lot of money. However, the last few years my income has slowly but steadily gone down to very little. Being this is my main source of income I need to know if a programmer can filter a contractors clients away from them to make it look and feel like they are just moving on? I feel the site owner has the ability to do this. After 14 years, the last two or three I make less than 1k a month where I use to make 2k. I have a friend that put this idea into my head and I have to find out if it might be true and if one is able to do this. The situation is complicated please don't ask why.

The notion of getting paid to do chats for a site owner is totally passe. Your income goes down each year because of changes in the world of internet interactions, not anything to do with you or the site you are on.

As for the remote possibility that someone is 'filtering' clients away, that doesn't require a programmer. They can be enticed away without much effort, whether hidden identity or not. But I doubt that that is happening. There are chat/talk/blog sites a thousand fold more each year.

These days, income is from selling ads on a topic page. Google and Facebook are the biggies.

Look around you guy! The competition for what you are doing has increased greatly from when you started. I can only suggest that you creatively innovate if you want to maintain or expand your audience. The notion that someone is stealing your customers is really absurd, and irrelevant since you never had any control over their chat habits anyway.

Fully agree with the previous poster on this one.