Entrecard account deleted – thanks for the warning(?)

It’s been a while since I wrote some articles here. Real life and such things keep me busy.

Anyway, to get on topic, I just received a mail notification that my EntreCard account got deleted:

Your account ‚Ruelicke.net‘ on entrecard.com has been deleted. The administrator gave the following reason:
Rule 12:
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: ####

Thanks for just deleting it without asking me to update my blog! The only „warning“ (though I don’t consider it as one) was another mail received 6 days ago:

Greetings, faithful Entrecard members.

We are experiencing a slowdown as a result of regularly increasing load. In other words we’re becoming more popular and it’s causing problems

Those who have been with us the longest are aware that these things happen when Entrecard hits milestones or users and widgets, etc. and we always scramble to fix it as fast as possible. Most importantly, we always do what is necessary to get the site back to its typical fast self.

So we will be having a performance-related outage 7 hours from the time of this email (on the hour) which will last for 2 hours max. We have also taken some temporary measures, in the hopes that things will be better for the next 7 hours.

I really do appreciate your patience as we continually evolve our site’s architecture to handle the load of bloggers who like our service. This compete graph illustrates how our service has grown sharply in September, and is on track to grow even more in October:
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/entrecard.com/?metric=uv – hence the load issues.

A Note about Quality Standards

While we’re down, please take advantage of the opportunity to review our quality guidelines located here:
http://entrecard.com/docs/doku.php?id=blog_quality_standards

Among the recent changes, and other rules we’d like to remind you of:

1. Blog’s must be updated within the last three (3) months
2. No full screen ads or popups
3. Blogs cannot consists of more than 50% advertisement posts, paid posts, or affiliate-linking posts
4. Entrecard widget must be present
5. No auto-playing audio -all audio must be initiated (played) by the visitor

We have taken a handful of new moderators onto the scene, and they have been combing over Entrecard weeding out everything that does not adhere to our basic quality guidelines. Thousands of accounts have been removed. To our rejoice, the overall quality of the Entrecard network has grown in leaps and bounds over the last month, and I’m sure you’ve noticed the difference. We strive now and always to create a high-quality network of bloggers that we can all be proud to participate in.

So, to wrap up, thank you for being patient with us while we deal with our increasing usage, and while we move quickly to enforce the updated quality standards network-wide

I don’t call it a direct warning. I only had like 5 minutes to read their „quality standards“ and after that I didn’t have time to write any posts (this one here is written under pressure, because I actually don’t have the time, but feel like I have to write it.).

The way EntreCard is enforcing their standards is not the best way. There are other methods than just deleting an account. Right now I’m writing a mail to them, I’ll keep you updated.

on a sidenote:
the entrecard widget is still working – looks like they still enjoy grabbing some clicks from my page although they deleted my account.