Yesterday, Martin at Corneymans Money-Blog wrote a blog post about EntreCard members getting scammed. Specifically, he noted that even after he removed the EntreCard widget from his website, several people continued to drop cards on that website.

For those not acquainted with EntreCard, it is a system where you have a widget on your site with an advertisement for another participating member. EntreCard members that visit your site can ‘drop a card’ on your site by clicking on the widget. Every time they do this, they get a credit, and then use the credits to put up advertisements up on other people’s sites.

Martin wondered how people could drop cards on a site that doesn’t have a widget. He accused people who have done that of ‘cheating’. I suggested that while this shouldn’t be happening, it is a bit of a leap to call such people cheaters. It could be a bug with EntreCard or something else we don’t fully understand.

Martin went on to provide an example of how people could cheat on EntreCard by posting just the part of the widget necessary to drop a card. It appears as if EntreCard has fixed this part of the problem since that now shows up as ‘Invalid’. However, it does not address the bigger part of the problem. In theory, anyone could post anyone else’s widget on their own site. They could even set up a page with the widget of the top hundred sites they wish to drop on. It may well be that EntreCard has come up with some code to address this, but I didn’t want to do extensive testing and end up setting off triggers at EntreCard.

Whether or not people have been dropping cards on people without widgets as a form of cheating, because of some bug, or simply using some dropping tool they don’t fully understand, it does seem that the number of drops, and the drops in the inbox are not as accurate as we would like. So, what can be done about this?

Using Google Analytics, I checked out the traffic coming to my site from EntreCard. Specifically, I went to Traffic Sources, Referring Sites, and clicked on EntreCard. I found that the top two pages where from the Category Browser, and from my details page. The remaining 370 pages were from people’s inboxes.

For obvious security reasons, you cannot go to other people’s inboxes. However, if you use their userid, you can get to their details at http://entrecard.com/user_details/nnnn where nnnn is their userid. As an example, my user detail page is http://entrecard.com/user_details/11692. With that, and a little poking around I could find out who came to my site and visited the most pages from their drop in box. It is worth noting that this is not necessarily related to how often they drop on me. In some cases people would come from their inbox to my site a couple times a day. Some would visit multiple pages on each visit. To me, this is much more interesting. These are the people who are engaged with my website.

With that, let me highlight a few of them. At the top of the list was Doctor Faustroll Writes the Wrongs.. Coming in second was First Door on the Left, which is a blog I love to visit as well. Third was One World Realty. In fourth was Moms Lifestyle. Rounding out the top five was The Last Bear.

This was a surprising and interesting list to me and I expect I’ll spend more time visiting sites that rank high on the page visits instead of how many cards they drop on me.

Am I concerned about possible cheating at EntreCard? Yeah, a little bit. I would much rather have visitors that come and read what I’m writing, than those who drop cards on me, perhaps without even visiting my site. However every card dropped on me does boost my popularity on EntreCard, so even those visits are not completely meaningless.

If there is cheating going on, I hope the folks at EntreCard fix it so it stops. More importantly, I hope people read my blog and that I continue to find other interesting blogs to read.

What do you think?