Watch out for the Entrecard style police in 2009

This is a follow-up to my earlier post about one of my blogs that was removed from the Entrecard system. Following an acrimonious dialogue in the Entrecard forum, they now say that they plan to 'clarify' their quality rules and remove large numbers of blogs that don't meet their standards and I am just the tip of the iceberg apparently.

What they say in their reply is that they are so overworked and understaffed that they don't have the resources to review every blog as soon as it is added, and that new blogs cannot regard themselves as 'accepted' just because they aren't immediately explicitly rejected and removed (and are still there after 6 weeks).

I would warn all Entrecard users that promote any affiliate links of any kind in their blog to watch their step. What I considered to be informational links - because they were not directly promoting my PERSONAL affiliate link - were still regarded by admin as being 'paid posts'.

No Entrecard user is safe now. If you don't keep a watch on any new rules and measure them against your blog, you could have your entire account removed overnight by their style police and don't bother appealing, it isn't just worth the stress and aggravation.

As users of the system, everyone needs to say once and for all that provided a blog meets the basic commonsense guidelines that everyone would want and expect, any further definition of quality opinions should not be driven by Entrecard's admin. but by the community.

The ideal situation is that some blogs might get visited and dropped on by the compulsive droppers but anything that the Entrecard community don't like or can't be bothered with, won't get the kind of quality traffic that stays, reads and follows.

I have some suggestions for Entrecard. Make every blogger pay just a few dollars for every blog they have on the system. Not as a monthly subscription, just when you join or add a blog to your list. It might deter some we don't really want in the system anyway and pay for them to take on some competent and technically qualified staff who aren't totally up their own ****.

Secondly, put any new definitions and guidelines in front of the community and let them decide whether the changes are needed. Whose community is it after all?

Let the community decide democratically whether the entire category of online moneymaking should disappear because according to how I've been treated, most of the blogs in there would be for the chop. My thread is now closed, but if you object to what has happened to me and the proposals, go to the forum and start a new one - now - today.

Thirdly, dramatically reduce the total number of drops you can do from each account per day. This will deter the people who ONLY drop for ec to buy advertising for themselves, build automated systems to help their excessive drop habit, and have no interest whatever in reading your content. Allowing 300 drops per day from each blog does not encourage the creation of quality content - you can't be spending time thinking and writing if you are just surfing from blog to blog and never even stopping to read a headline!

Now - an example of the most astounding hypocrisy from Entrecard! If you have a VIP blog and post on Today.com, you receive $1 for each post (1 per day) and every view to your page is paid for. Entrecard users are allowed to join Today.com. Today.com bloggers can carry an Entrecard widget although other kinds of advertising widgets are not permitted. Even more hypocritical is the fact that Entrecard actually carry advertising for Today.com on their front page!

And, incredibly after all my efforts to get an answer, no-one at Entrecard was able to supply one to the original question - did a 'sticky post' with a date in the future draw the blog to their attention in the first place. They say they can't be expected to be experts in every blogging platform - I'm not asking them to be, it's their own system I'm enquiring about! They should be expected to know about that, shouldn't they? Hmm.