EntreBlast

Archive for the ‘News’ Category

Entrecard has a special deal for its members! For today only when you drop on blogs, you’ll receive 2 Entrecard credits instead of the usual 1 EC. To make up for this promotion, you won’t receive any ECs for drops you receive, only double for drops you make.

This is especially beneficial for those who drop a lot more than they receive. For reciprocal droppers like me, those who just drop on the blogs that are in their ‘Drops Inbox’, it doesn’t really make a difference unless they go past their Drops Inbox and find other blogs.

In yesterday’s post, I pointed out the many issues users were experiencing Wednesday and yesterday. At 7 pm I edited the post and said that the issues were fixed.

Though the problems are fixed, you might still notice the amount of Entrecard credits you have is still lower than what it was a few days ago. This is because any transactions made yesterday were not saved. So basically, all of the drops you’ve made and received yesterday don’t count.

These problems were not addressed by a Entrecard admin on the Entrecard blog or via an e-mail announcement. But, after 11 pages of discussion by confused and angry Entrecard members, Phirate finally discussed what had happened:

The internal system that manages drops and credits suffered an unexpected and serious disconnection from the database that manages our long-term storage.

As a result, it was unable to commit operations like drops to the back-end, despite being able to keep track of such things internally.

This disconnection has never happened before, and in theory at least shouldn’t actually have been possible – the system should have reconnected itself as soon as it could. It was necessary to restart the affected process and thus only drops that were recorded by the database could be recovered to generate current balances.

I apologize, it’s not possible to recover drops made during the time when the disconnect was in effect.

It’s disappointing that it took so long for these problems to be addressed by someone who knows what’s going on, as there were a lot of concerned members. Good thing is, everything is now working! The ads that were supposed to be running yesterday but didn’t change are running now, so if you were supposed to have an ad running, it’s up now.

Since yesterday, users have been experiencing a multitude of technical problems with Entrecard. These problems include:

• Number of cards dropped on you showing ‘0′
• Drops Inbox not updating with cards you’ve dropped on
• The number of card drops on the Statistics page does not match the number of card drops at the top of the screen
• Ads running on widgets aren’t changing
• Statistic charts are empty for incoming and outgoing drops today are not showing

So if you’re experiencing problems, just try to hang tight. You’re still being credited for your drops. Hopefully these problems will be fixed soon.

Update: It’s 7 pm EST and it looks like the problems have been fixed.

I got up this morning, and as I was doing my usual check on Entrecard, I noticed something different about the Entrecard forums.

The Entrecard forums are finally reopened. Even though they said it was reopened about a week ago, they kind forget a big part of that announcement – the reopening of the Entrecard forums. This was brought up in the technical support forums but it seemed like Phirate and Graham either weren’t online ever or ignored the threads. No one had access to the “open” forum, except the VIPs of course. It was a bit frustrating.

But anyways, now everyone can view most of the forums (except the VIP forum), and since they are a great resource for bloggers in promoting their site and services, you might want to check out the Entrecard forums.

Entrecard has announced new forum rules. There is NO bashing allowed on the Entrecard forums, and you must be a member to join. But, perhaps the most controversial new rule is: you must have purchased 400 ads to join.

This move is a major flub by Entrecard. Already, the forums aren’t as active as they could be, and this just makes it worse. This severly cuts back the activity of the forum. The forum should be another helpful tool for bloggers wanting to promote their blog, but it was also used to just relax, get to know other bloggers, share tips and tricks, and promote contests.

Why these new rules?

Obviously, it’s because some members of the forum were just going around complaining, bashing, and starting controversy. However, apparently this has nothing to do with the Entrecard bashing on the forum:

Graham believes in negative controversy, this is nothing to do with bad rep slinging. It is expected there will be negative talk about entrecard and its decisions.

Then why all of a sudden do we have these new rules? It’s understandable they won’t permit bashing on the forum. But the restriction that you have to have purchased 400 ads in order to join? This prevents all new members from joining the forums, and many of us members who don’t buy a lot of ads- but use our Entrecard credits for other purposes such as contests.

I’m normally for the moves Entrecard makes, but not this one. Many people have complained about this new rule but apparently it’s not being changed. Maybe when it’s noticed that the forums are now completely dead, they’ll think about this 400 ad rule.

Comment on this post, and share what you think about Entrecard’s new forum structure.

This may be a bit old news but I’m catching up here. Entrecard has finally decided to upgrade their forums to a new and improved vBulletin forum. It’s a completely fresh and seperate system so old posts are gone, and you’ll have to register seperately on the new Entrecard forums.

However, the upside is so much better. The new forum is  faster than the old one, and is organized a whole lot better. Threads dont’ disappear through the pages just because they are old and users have a vast range of new opportunities. You can easily PM a user directly, leave reputation, and even have a signature. The PM system and signature option becomes available after 15 posts. Users can also subscribe via e-mail to their favorite threads to track to posts.

If you’re familiar with vBulletin these things are common in a vBulletin forum but still certainly beat the old Entrecard forum. So, if you’re one who has avoided the forums because of it’s inconvenience, I recommend you check out the Entrecard forums now and give it a shot.

8 major changes have been made to the Entrecard Economy system:

• Buy Credits for Less ($6.00/1000 ECs)
• Pricing Increments Added (View the advertising page for details)
• Members are not allowed to sell credits
• Credit Transfer Limits (limit of 1000EC/week)
• Transfer Tax (12.5% on transfers)
• Blogs cannot be unlinked (unless you ask for deletion)
• Coupons are Gone
• Shop is Closed (until an improved shop is released)

Some aren’t so major, and some have been talked about a lot and were bound to be put in action, but there is only one I and many other Entrecarders have a problem about: credit transfer limits. Tomorow, I’ll post my little rant/investigation on this new change. Feel free to share what you think of these changes below. Which ones affect you?

For more information, check out the Entrecard Economy Changes official blog post.

Looks like the Entrecard staff has finally taken intiative to get rid of a wider variety of spammy blogs. Entrecard has updated their quality blog standards for participating in Entrecard. Some are old and obvious while a few are new.

The new standards for being able to participate in Entrecard include:

• No Full Screen Ads (the ones that take you to another page and though you have the option to skip, it is seriously annoying)
• Entrecard Widget must be present (doesn’t make sense for you not to have the widget on anyways)
• No Auto-playing audio (not too many of these but they are annoying as well)
• Content must be recent (last post cannot be older than 6 months; about time they did something like this!)

I am very happy with the recent update to their blog requirements. It is possible to fix your blog if you are not meeting any of these requirements, just make sure to do so soon. Check out the full list of blog standards for Entrecard on the Entrecard blog.

Yesterday Graham unleashed a new project, called the Startup Blog Project. The goal is to prove how beneficial Entrecard can be for any blogger.

How it’ll be done: Graham is going to use Entrecard like any other blogger- dropping on cards and using those credits to advertise to related blogs. He won’t be buying credits, or giving himself free credits because he could easily do so. Howeer, us normal Entrecard users can’t just give ourselves free credits, so he’s going to play the game fair.

In the end, Graham’s out to prove that Entrecard IS a great way to build a blog. Once he starts dropping, others will visit his site. He’ll eventually gain regular readers and subscribers. Then, after his blog has been live for some time, he’ll start receiving backlinks, search engine traffic, and social bookmarking traffic. Eventually, his traffic won’t come from Entrecard as much anymore.

I’ve already proven this idea. EntreBlast is based on Entrecard. For a while, all my traffic was from dropping and being dropped on- 100% Entrecard traffic. Now, almost 30% of my traffic is from direct and search engines combined. Overall, Entrecard is less than 25% of EntreBlast’s source of traffic.

To avoid skewing the project, I won’t be linking to Graham’s case study blog. You’ll have to check out the Blog Startup Project post yourself.

Buzz has been generating yesterday after Graham mentioned in the ‘Latest Buzz’ section of the Dashboard that Entrecard is going to be announcing its new partner on Tuesday. Well, today is the day. At 00:00 AM Eastern time, Graham announced Entrecard’s new partner.

The new Entrecard partner is:

Sezwho

Sezwho is a social networking site encouraging users to provide quality content and build a reputation for doing so. Your contributions (such as guest posting and commenting) get tracked and can be seen on your Sezwho profile. This builds credibility and reputation.

What does this mean for Entrecard now?

Sezwho will help add a community feel as well as rewarding users for commenting on other blogs. You’ll earn ECs for comments that you make on blogs. Quality comments is a must though! You won’t earn credits for lame comments. Users will rate your comments and from there you’ll receive between 1 and 10 ECs. Sweet huh?

Get Started with Sezwho

Getting started is super easy. You can register from your Entrecard Dashboard! Once there, under QuickStats, you should see a link asking you to sign up with Sezwho. Fill out the three fields and you are done! Once you have registered, you will have to download and activate the plugin to your blog.

For more information, Graham has posted a lengthy announcement on the Entrecard blog. Check out the official announcement of the partnership between Entrecard and Sezwho.

P.S – Sezwho is activated on EntreBlast!