I finally signed up for entrecard yesterday and after toying with it for about an hour I realized what a sham it is. I estimate that less than 1% of all traffic generated by entrecard is viable, worthwhile traffic. Instead, it is a brilliant idea on their part to take advantage of every blogger’s #1 desire: free traffic. Instead of getting useful traffic, what you are getting are people popping in, dropping their card, and scrambling back to their entrecard dashboard to see if they have enough credits to buy that ad on blog X. For some reason…I guess the eternal optimism that goes along with a profound desire for anything free….they think (or hope) that when they place their entrecard ad, they will get useful traffic. What do they get instead? They get people popping in, dropping their card, and rushing back to their entrecard dashboard to see if they have enough credits to buy that ad on blog Y. I’m going to coin this phenomenon as the Entrecard Zombie Circle.
So what to do? I have this worthless widget installed on my blog that will never provide any useful results. Do I take it off, or try to play the system? I like the way you think…I played the system. I wasn’t going to waste my time trying to play the system like most….I was going to shake things up. I was going to have more of those worthless little credits than any man alive….and have my little ad on every blog in the zombie network.
The first thing I did was download the firefox plugin iMacros. For those that don’t know about firefox, it is an open source web browser. Open source means that it is both free and open to programmers to write plugins and widgets for it, much like wordpress. So you can do much more with firefox as opposed to other web browsers and what iMacros does is allow you to record a series of actions within the browser and replay it as a loop.
Next, if you are signed in to your entrecard account and go to an entrecard ad and scroll your mouse over the “drop” button, you will notice a link like this - http://entrecard.com/static/amazon/button.html?user_id=4607 where the number at the end is that users id. You get credit for the drop because your id is stored in a cookie. If you cut and paste that link into a new browser, you get nothing but the drop button…you don’t have to wait for their blog to load. Now I just needed to cycle that link, starting from 1 to infinity to cover every drop I could make. This took some thinking.
I started thinking about page hit counters. They start at one and go to infinity, but how to make it work with the entrecard drop links? I created a blank html page and found some javascript code that uses cookies to display how many times you have viewed a particular page. I morphed this with the entracard drop url so that when the page was loaded, it displayed the text http://entrecard.com/static/amazon/button.html?user_id=1 Then, each time the page was refreshed, the drop url’s id number at the end increased by one. So now I could use iMacro to cycle through the act of dropping on every entrecard user id in existence. The javascript went as follows -
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN”>
<html>
<head>
<title>Untitled</title>
</head>
<body>
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=”JavaScript”>
<!–
function nameDefined(ckie,nme)
{
var splitValues
var i
for (i=0;i<ckie.length;++i)
{
splitValues=ckie[i].split(”=”)
if (splitValues[0]==nme) return true
}
return false
}
function delBlanks(strng)
{
var result=”"
var i
var chrn
for (i=0;i<strng.length;++i) {
chrn=strng.charAt(i)
if (chrn!=” “) result += chrn
}
return result
}
function getCookieValue(ckie,nme)
{
var splitValues
var i
for(i=0;i<ckie.length;++i) {
splitValues=ckie[i].split(”=”)
if(splitValues[0]==nme) return splitValues[1]
}
return “”
}
function insertCounter() {
readCookie()
displayCounter()
}
function displayCounter() {
document.write(’<H3 ALIGN=”CENTER”>’)
document.write(”http://entrecard.com/static/amazon/button.html?user_id=”)
if(counter==1) document.write(”the first time.”)
else document.write(counter)
document.writeln(’</H3>’)
}
function readCookie() {
var cookie=document.cookie
counter=0
var chkdCookie=delBlanks(cookie) //are on the client computer
var nvpair=chkdCookie.split(”;”)
if(nameDefined(nvpair,”pageCount”))
counter=parseInt(getCookieValue(nvpair,”pageCount”))
++counter
var futdate = new Date()
var expdate = futdate.getTime()
expdate += 3600000 * 24 *30 //expires in 1 hour
futdate.setTime(expdate)
var newCookie=”pageCount=”+counter
newCookie += “; expires=” + futdate.toGMTString()
window.document.cookie=newCookie
}
// –>
</SCRIPT>
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=”JavaScript”>
<!–
insertCounter()
// –>
</SCRIPT>
</body>
</html>
Now what this did was display what I wanted, but in simple text form rather than a click-able link. To get around this problem, I downloaded the firefox linkification plugin which turns any segment of text beginning with “http:” into a click-able link. Then, using firefox, I was able to bring up the page I created, started recording actions, clicked the link, clicked drop, hit back twice, refreshed the page, then stopped recording. At that point, I just told firefox to replay the loop and there it went…..dropping on every entrecard user id from 1 to infinity…..all while I sat there laughing! In another browser, I kept refreshing my entrecard dashboard and watched the credits pile high. I was already writing down some of the laws I was going to make when I soon would rule the world, when the credits stopped piling up. Apparently entrecard has code that caught my sneaky act of defiance. My credits dropped to -47. Now even when I do a legitimate drop, I get no credit. BUSTED So for now at least, fluorescent stretchy camouflage pants are still legal.
Thinking a little deeper….there is apparently no defense within entrecard to keep people from dropping from the direct drop url because for a while, I was getting mongo credits. It must be something regarding the number of credits amassed over a certain period of time. Hmmm…gets me thinking again…
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And there I was feeling bad for my pretty harsh criticism of Entrecard. I even wrote a post the next day encouraging bloggers to remain positive and remember to never make it personal. I even apologized. I even emailed a commentator on this blog that was allegedly associated with entrecard and asked if he would like to do an interview or guest post explaining any plans they have to combat the “power droppers” and make their program a more beneficial experience for their users. I simply got a “No”. Now I would like to share a quick back and forth I had with someone allegedly associated with the fine folks at Entrecard. This occurred on an unnamed blog forum:
