My original mail (unaltered, excluded the quoted part of their notification mail)
Dear Sir or Madam,
I’d like to inform you that my website, www.ruelicke.net, no longer violates the blog quality standard rule 12. I’d appreciate it if you undo the deletion of my account.
Further I’d like to complain about the policy regarding the deletion of accounts. I can understand it, if you delete accounts which heavily violate the rules, however, I do not understand, why you just delete an account because the last post was longer than 3 months ago. In my opinion, at least a warning and a request to update the blog/website is a must.
If you consider the „Entrecard – critical load“ email as a warning, be assured that I did not read it as a warning. I suggest you review your policy regarding deleting accounts, especially as we, the authors of the blogs/websites, do not know when one of your moderators reviews our site. Maybe we scheduled a post to update our site but the deletion was done before/exactly on the day the post went live? Just some thoughts about it.
Regards,
Marco Ruelicke
Their reply
Please read the following from our blog quality standards page. This is not a new rule, and has always been our policy:
Blogs that do not meet our quality standards will be removed from the network. Due to the large number of accounts in the system we are unable to warn account owners of violations prior to deletion. It is your responsibility to ensure that your site does not violate our standards. This account was not deleted until a few days after you received the notice to review the rules.
Because your blog has been inactive for over 90 days, it will be treated as a new blog and we will require 5 quality posts in order for it to be reinstated. The one where you wrote under pressure, complaining about not getting a warning does not count towards that quota. And FYI, your widget is not working and has not been since your account was deleted, so no one is „grabbing“ any clicks from you.
My reply
I assume with this kind of policy you’ll most likely loose many customers. I have no interest in signing up again as there is no way to re-gain the points I accumulated until now. I didn’t even have the time to spend those points, meaning that I had no benefit from Entrecard at all.
As far as I’m concerned about the quality standards policy, I do not remember ever reading about it when I signed up. I did read everything important to make sure I do not violate any kind of ToS.
Using the excuse of not being able to inform/warn account owners doesn’t work in my opinion. You have the time to review each account, so you’ll have the time to send pretyped emails to the account owners.
Anyway, as I see it, Entrecard has no interest in keeping a customer. Even with no real time to keep my page up-to-date, I still had the time to give other Entrecard users the chance to have their ads on my site. In my opinion, you should use „account activity“ as another part to decide if a site has to be considered „dead“ or not.
It is just a suggestion from a costumer, who stayed with Entrecard even after many of his friends decided to quit.
Have a nice day
Marco Ruelicke
The conclusion
I drop Entrecard, like many other people did. I’d guess, Entrecard is going down, quality and customer wise. Maybe they should reconsider parts of their policy as it is anything but healthy.
What’s your opinion about Entrecard?