Cheating Entrecard
So I was surfing around on the net today and decided to see how I was doing in entrecard.
For those of you who have been living under a rock, Entrecard is a way to generate a bit of traffic to your site with a 125×125 sized ad.
It’s generated about 350 clicks or so thus far. Nothing to go - OMG - about but it’s a few people that probably wouldn’t have seen my blog previously.
And, it’s certainly done better than BlogRush which I removed from my blog.
Anyhow, here’s my dashboard on Entrecard:
Like I said, nothing spectacular…
However, I was curious about the javascript that Entrecard uses so I decided to investigate it a little bit.
It turns out that Entrecard is using the Amazon S3 service which is a way for you to store files and let someone else deal with the troubles of providing lots of bandwidth. It’s a great solution if you think that your site is going to get hammered by its users.
The second thing that I noticed once I opened the script was this bit of code:
if (window.location.href.match(”memhub.com”
|| window.location.href.match(”peas.in”
document.write(”");
} else {
ecard_widget_render(ecard_type, ecard_user_id);
}
It turns out that Entrecard is currently banning four sites from displaying the Entrecard widget.
One of the sites above - peas.in - seems to have come up with ways to get entrecard credits - basically gaming their system.
For which, of course, they got banned.
I think the moral of the story is that if you’re going to game the system like they were you shouldn’t make it so public - or at the very least, don’t post it on your blog.
G-Man
P.S. Entrecard, if you’re reading this, you can hire me to make your system more secure against gaming like this.
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