On Blogging Australia


Aussie Bloggers, Aussie Blogs

Entrecard: Biting the hand that feeds…

By AndrewBoyd • Oct 1st, 2008 • Category: Blogging tips, Recent posts

My relationship with Entrecard has come to an end.

After encouraging dozens of other people to join, blogging about them repeatedly, and maintaining the Aussie Bloggers on Entrecard list since January this year, I received an email from them this morning to say that my account had been deleted - one of the three blogs I had displaying Entrecard links doesn’t meet their quality standards.  I emailed them and asked why - and got the following unsigned reply:

As the email states rule 3, http://entrecard.com/docs/doku.php?id=blog_quality_standards

The rules are, Minimum 5 posts: Blogs with no posts, or less than 5 posts, will be removed. Also rule 12 Content must be recent: Sites that have not been updated in six months will be removed.

This blog had less than 5 posts, all of which were well over 8 months old.

I replied:

Dear anonymous support person,
As my email states, this is a bit insulting after a lot of promotion on my part ( above and beyond any personal gain I may have had as a result) encouraging people to use Entrecard.
Time will tell if things change with my departure and followon reporting. I wish you the best of luck in the future.
Best regards, Andrew

They are a private organisation, have their own rules and standards, and I opted to join them, fine. My bad, I trusted them to keep up their end of the bargain. I’m not going to get emotional and list some of the scraper and one-post blogspot blogs that are still on Entrecard - I can’t get that excited about it.

I’ve written before about the responsibility that social computing platforms of all types have to their users - the implied social contract should (and mostly does) go beyond the petty legalese. A lot of the people that felt shabbily treated by WordPress felt that way because of the abuse by one of the WP forum moderators. Basically, I think that a lot of people will no longer deal with the rude - and “like it or lump it” support is rude, rules or no rules.

I’m not going to encourage you to leave Entrecard or to stay with them - I think I’ve probably wasted enough energy on them over the last 10 months I’ve been a member and unofficial evangelist.

I’ve deleted the Aussie Bloggers on Entrecard list - should someone else want to take it on, here is the list effective 1 October 2008 (sans my blogs):

UPDATE: All three blogs really have been deleted. I’ve just received the following email:

Your account ‘On Blogging Australia’ on entrecard.com has been deleted. The administrator gave the following reason:

rule 7, http://entrecard.com/docs/doku.php?id=blog_quality_standards

Please contact deleted@entrecard.com if you have any questions regarding this action.

Please include the following:
User ID: XXXX

It’s official, I really do no longer have a relationship with Entrecard. Anyone who has in mind to criticise them, please take this as an example. No satisfactory answers, only snarkiness - then deletion.

Tagged as:

AndrewBoyd is a consultant by day and blogger by night. He loves good food, good wine, and discussing faceted classification schemes with friends.
Email this author | All posts by AndrewBoyd

26 Responses »

  1. Karen (Miscellaneous Mum) (3 comments.) on October 1st, 2008 at 6:28 pm:

    That makes no sense as I know other blogs that haven’t updated for 6 months are still on Entrecard (I see my blog’s not on that list there…)

    That is really sad and very poor on their part, as you say. I’m sorry about that :(

  2. AndrewBoyd on October 1st, 2008 at 6:31 pm:

    Hi Karen,

    thank you for your comment. I thought it was poor - and I’ve voted with my feet (not that I had much choice, with the deletion and all) :)

    No big deal. I’m probably more puzzled at their stupidity than I am mad now that I’ve had all day to think about it.

    Cheers, Andrew

  3. anonymum (2 comments.) on October 1st, 2008 at 6:58 pm:

    I’m about over Entrecard myself Andrew. Once they started making the changes a little while ago it all became too hard. I have 3 ads to go up, and that will be me done I think.
    I’ll look into how I delete my account and giving my credits away. Assuming I can do that now
    *shrug*
    If they’d left it the way it was, I tend to thing it would have been easier to stay in and easier to understand.

  4. Meg (34 comments.) on October 1st, 2008 at 7:23 pm:

    Reminds me of your Review Me experience - sucks when there’s so much crap out there. It is becoming more of a hassle than it’s worth - can’t remember the last time I advertised…. Think I may just follow suit.

  5. AndrewBoyd on October 1st, 2008 at 7:28 pm:

    Hi Maureen,

    I admit that I don’t like the “new Entrecard” as much as I did the old, but I was happy to play along anyhow and see where the experiment was going.

    As to giving credits away - I must have had 5,000 EC before today, gone now :) To think of how proud I was to be racking them up… peh :)

    Really though, I never wrote a line of code for them, never represented them officially, so they can justify to themselves that they don’t owe me a thing.

    I feel a bit bad for those people that I encouraged to join. I will be more careful next time, I promise.

    Best regards, Andrew

  6. AndrewBoyd on October 1st, 2008 at 7:33 pm:

    Hi Meg,

    I think that there is a feeling out there amongst the “cool 2.0 kids” that a good idea means that all who participate owe them something. To me, it is a transaction - they give me enjoyment/traffic/community, I help to build that community.

    The difference with ReviewMe was that I didn’t put any effort into it at all compared to the amount of time and energy I wasted on Entrecard. Similar experience I guess, but a shorter path to Hell.

    Like I said above, I don’t want to encourage anyone to leave Entrecard, but I am darn sure not going to go out of my way to encourage anyone to stay either :)

    Cheers, Andrew

  7. Colin Campbell (21 comments.) on October 1st, 2008 at 8:36 pm:

    A lot of the fun has gone out of this blogging lark. Too many people too focused on earning $20 a month at the expense of community and interesting content.

  8. AndrewBoyd on October 1st, 2008 at 8:43 pm:

    Hi Colin,

    I agree entirely. Most of us earn more in an hour in our day jobs than in a month of chasing the bloggy dollar.

    I think that we’ve become like the mexican fisherman entranced by the american entrepreneur - giving up playing in the afternoons so that we can work our bums off to afford the three extra fishing boats for 20 years so that we can retire and have the afternoons off.

    Where is the love?

    Cheers, Andrew

  9. jen (1 comments.) on October 1st, 2008 at 8:55 pm:

    This makes me glad that I didn’t jump on the entrecard bandwagon.

  10. AndrewBoyd on October 1st, 2008 at 9:00 pm:

    Hi Jen,

    thank you for your comment. I am sort of wishing I hadn’t either now :)

    Cheers, Andrew

  11. Ben Barden (4 comments.) on October 1st, 2008 at 9:17 pm:

    Hey Andrew, I thought one of your blogs was deleted, not your entire account? If you write 2 more posts on that blog and send me an email, it will be reinstated.

    I don’t want to make exceptions to a rule that’s aimed at keeping content relatively fresh and relevant - it’d end badly, we have a hard enough time keeping back the spam waves as it is.

    Do report the spam sites either way, they need to be removed from the system!

    Ben

  12. Lin Burress (4 comments.) on October 1st, 2008 at 9:29 pm:

    Hi Andrew,

    I became dissatisfied with Entrecard a couple of months ago and actually requested that my account be deleted. My biggest issue was the very high bounce rate it caused for my site, with people simply trying to build up credits by doing what I refer to as a hit-and-run. SOME Entrecard users would leave a comment on the latest post, and I use the term “comment” loosely, then leave and never be seen or heard from again. I haven’t used Entrecard for awhile now, and the bounce rate dropped dramatically and time spent on my site reading other articles has greatly improved since kicking Entrecard to the curb.

  13. Prizetastic (1 comments.) on October 2nd, 2008 at 12:47 am:

    Wow, I’m a bit behind the times, I only joined entrecard tonight after focusing on websites for a while instead of blogging….. decided to get back into blogging and join up, so this news is a little worrying, thanks for the list though, glad I got to see it so I can track down some fellow aussie blogs to have a squiz at

  14. Kelley (5 comments.) on October 2nd, 2008 at 9:44 am:

    I removed my Entrecard ads a while back. I was mainly getting spammy hits anyway and when they did comment it was ‘come and check me out!’ sort of thing. Meh.

    I think they messed with the wrong blogger. I wonder how many of the sites that are posting often are just scraping content from others?

  15. Graham Langdon (1 comments.) on October 2nd, 2008 at 10:59 am:

    I’m sorry but our quality standards do not let blogs less than 5 posts old in the network. i’m terribly sorry you’ve had this experience and would encourage you to change your mind at some point in the future, with any blogs that meet the quality guidelines for a network as a whole that all members have to abide by.

    best,
    Graham

  16. AndrewBoyd on October 2nd, 2008 at 4:21 pm:

    Hi Ben,

    I took “Your Entrecard account has been deleted” to mean that my Entrecard account had been deleted because of the one blog of unacceptable quality. If they meant “one of your blogs has been taken off our system but your account is still there” I am guessing that is what they would have said.

    I’m not reporting any spam sites - the one report I put in (very early on) about someone who had accepted my ad but removed their widget went unacknowledged, and I’m not inclined to put any more energy into it.

    Best regards, Andrew

  17. AndrewBoyd on October 2nd, 2008 at 4:23 pm:

    Hi Lin,

    I guess the “bounce in bounce out” people were good for ad revenue and visitor numbers - and some of them probably did stay when they visited here. Some people aim for low bounce rates, others for total visitor numbers, depending on what they really want.

    Best regards, Andrew

  18. AndrewBoyd on October 2nd, 2008 at 4:26 pm:

    Hi Prizetastic,

    thank you for your comment.

    Your mileage may vary - I mostly really liked being part of Entrecard until I got canned. Like Lin above, you may be after sustained traffic rather than a lot of quick visitors, and it may not work for you. Or it might be fine. I’m not telling you to leave, just reporting my own experience :)

    Cheers, Andrew

  19. AndrewBoyd on October 2nd, 2008 at 4:28 pm:

    Dear Kelley,

    thank you for your comment :)

    They are responding to the scraper/spammy sites with this campaign, I guess. I seem to be caught in the middle :) No sign of them reversing the policy any time soon by the looks of Graham’s comment above - like I said, their service, their call.

    Best regards, Andrew

  20. AndrewBoyd on October 2nd, 2008 at 4:42 pm:

    Hi Graham,

    thanks for responding.

    Let me explain why I am not going to make an effort to try and get my account restored.

    This blog, up until yesterday, contained an Entrecard widget. This blog, as far as I am aware, meets your quality criteria - a few people think so too apart from me (you can probably count the comments and divide by two as well as I can). 161 published posts over the last 14 months is more than the three on getyerown.com - I challenge you to find a scrap of porn there or here, or spam, or scraped content.

    Nothin world-changing on On Blogging Australia, but I do resent the implication that this blog is of unacceptable quality. I resent being told that by an anonymous support person, and I resent being told it again by you.

    While I do appreciate the invitation to re-apply once I have got my act together, the chances of my going out of my way to try and figure out what is of acceptable quality to you and then re-engage at this point are probably not very good :)

    As someone that has spent most of the last three months helping to design and implement a process and product quality model for a half-billion dollar program of work, let me tell you - your quality program is broken. It is not implemented consistently, humanely, or transparently. If you want specifics of how it might work without driving people away, let me know.

    Best regards, Andrew

  21. Ben Barden (4 comments.) on October 2nd, 2008 at 5:41 pm:

    Hi Andrew,

    I have checked, and the only blog that was deleted was Get A Real Blog, which has 3 posts. On Blogging Australia was not deleted as it does not violate any rules.

    In the beginning, only the site admins had access to the site reports, and there simply wasn’t the resource to work on the reports. Moderators now have access to the reports, and we are on top of them. I’m sorry if you didn’t get a satisfactory response when you reported a site, although you may find the site you reported has been deleted - without knowing the URL I don’t know either way. :)

    It would be a shame if people won’t submit reports due to past mistakes that have since been corrected. We are always on the lookout for sites that should not be in the network, but with so many sites, we need all the help we can get.

  22. AndrewBoyd on October 2nd, 2008 at 10:26 pm:

    Hi Ben,

    that is weird - why do they say “your account has been deleted” when it is really “one of your blogs is being taken out of the system” when the three blogs are under one login id? I equate account to login - but you seem to be saying that it is more like online banking, where one may access 5 different accounts (such as credit card, savings, mortgage etc) under the one login. This is certainly one way to do it - but it is confusing.

    I see that I can log into my Entrecard account still.

    Regardless - I can’t see myself participating any longer with the two remaining blogs - the quality system is flawed, and the responses from both “anonymous support person” and Graham really didn’t help calm my ruffled feathers - telling me that I was running a substandard blog really is not “winning friends and influencing people”. If they won’t listen to me, perhaps you can talk to them about the consistent, humane, and transparent factors that are missing from the quality system as it stands at the moment.

    And if they won’t listen to me, then perhaps they could read the comments above - the last time I had this many “me too” comments about an issue, it related to WordPress :)

    Best regards, Andrew

  23. Lightening (2 comments.) on October 9th, 2008 at 12:15 pm:

    I’m sorry to hear of your negative experience Andrew. I do think Entrecard is still evolving and finding it’s feet and see that as a positive thing. I also feel what they’re trying to do in eradicating blogs that aren’t regularly posted on is a positive thing for all Entrecard users. However, perhaps they could do with improving their communication system and providing some kind of protest system so people can appeal any decisions made. I guess, like Ben said, there is a man-hours issue that makes it difficult to keep everybody happy.

    I have to admit that I don’t spend much time on Entrecard myself these days, mostly using it in the way it was originally designed - as a way of letting people know I’ve been. However, I rarely check my own inbox so I’m not sure how much it really matters. I still think it’s a good way for a new blog to find it’s first few visitors and have picked up a few that way myself. I doubt that I’ll ever return to using it as vehemently as I did when I first started.

    As for bouncing traffic (as brought up by your commenters) - I find most social networking has a high level of bounce but it still has it’s value.

    I would like to thank you for maintaining the list. I’m not sure how much traffic it has brought you but I know that I have had many visitors as a result of the list. So, thank you.

    If no one else has indicated they’d like to maintain the list, I would consider putting it on Lightening’s Blogworld. I have the room for an extra page and wouldn’t mind hosting it. Even though I don’t invest a lot of time in Entrecard, I still think it has a place of value in the blogosphere and I’m not prepared to throw the baby out with the bathwater just yet. Time will tell how long I feel this way I guess.

    But I am very sorry that you feel the way you do.

  24. Duncan (1 comments.) on October 12th, 2008 at 8:24 pm:

    Hi Andrew. Some time ago, when I moved from duncans.tv to theinspirationroom.com, I gave away all my credits and closed my account. Though I see it’s still sitting there, my access to it is gone. While I enjoyed the interaction that came from the Entrecard process, I found I needed to reduce the number of widgets on my site.

  25. Clindy (1 comments.) on October 21st, 2008 at 2:51 pm:

    Reminds me of your Review Me experience - sucks when there’s so much crap out there. It is becoming more of a hassle than it’s worth - can’t remember the last time I advertised…. Think I may just follow suit.

  26. Les (1 comments.) on November 11th, 2008 at 3:41 pm:

    Hi Andrew
    I know from my travels that a lot of people are starting to drop out of EntreCard. It seems that no one can really get a community of bloggers together. Blogrush died, EC will simply price itself out of the market - I mean, taxing the transfer of credits after you have already taxed the income (75% of earnings taxed).

    I will stick to forums and blogcatlog for now. I too will be walking away from EC in the next couple of days.

    cheers
    les

Leave a Reply