The inbox located on the Entrecard Dashboard is a relatively recent change. In the past you only saw the last 20 or so droppers in an RSS feed. The inbox currently shows you all the people who have dropped cards on you. This change in the way the inbox works has created many problems for Entrecard. Problems that seem to have gone unnoticed. As the latest controversy brought to light, some members of Entrecard are in love with the inbox. Not only do they drop from the cards found there, but they demand others declare whether or not they drop from there as well. Lost in the ensuing Firestorm was the answer to why only dropping from the inbox was bad.
The first reason the inbox sucks is called the cutoff limit. Inbox droppers drop on the first 300 cards that appear. This means if you get more than 300 drops in a single day, somebody is getting screwed because you can’t return them all. While list droppers will normally drop on their favorite or most loyal sites first, inbox droppers do the opposite. The people who drop at 12am are the very last ones to appear on the list, and thus the last in line to receive drops. Guess who gets the shaft? If I drop on a site 30 times a month, I expect some drops in return, regardless of the time of day I drop on you. Don’t screw me because 300 other cards appeared in your inbox first.
The second reason the inbox sucks is called Breaking the Chain. Suppose you can’t drop for one day or more? The reason doesn’t matter, be it computer failure, illness, travel, ISP down or whatever. If you don’t appear in another inbox, you aren’t getting any drops back. If you don’t get drops back, who do you drop on? Once the chain is broken, the effects are immediately felt. With list droppers, taking a day or week off doesn’t matter until the list dropper updates their list.
The third reason the inbox sucks is called The Guilt Factor. Many people now look at the inbox the same way as receiving an email. They feel they have an obligation to respond to a card drop. If they don’t reciprocate, they feel guilty. When people quit Entrecard, Taking up too much time is cited as the number one reason. The truth is nobody is forced to drop, reciprocate, read, comment, post in the forums, or anything else. All you have to do is display the widget. Doing any of the above is likely to result in considerably more traffic, but the choice is still yours. Stop letting guilt rule your life and bookmark only your favorite sites. Screw the inbox and drop on the sites YOU want to visit. If you are so inclined, visit those who drop on you when you feel up to it.
Why is dropping from the inbox so popular? It makes life easy by taking away the decision making of who to drop on. Rather than bookmark your favorite sites, you simply respond to all the cards found in your inbox. Great logic… so the person with a great blog, but limited time to drop gets screwed. However, the spammer who has time to drop 300 cards a day for 5 accounts gets to demand all your time receiving guilt based return drops. Sorry, but that is stupid. Entrecard already let the cat out of the bag, so don’t expect the inbox to change it’s behavior any time soon.
So what is the best way to drop cards? Whatever method you enjoy most. For me, I find dropping around 250 cards off my list of bookmarks first, then dropping 50 more cards on inbox people to be the most fair. Come up with your own method, but don’t let anyone twist your arm to drop from the inbox.
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15 users commented in " Entrecard: Reasons Why The Inbox Stinks "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a Trackback **********Wouldn’t it be great if they added a feature to the inbox which showed just how many drops that person made on you (sort of like the popularity number that comes up as you mouse over the entrecards)…it would eliminate multiple icons in your inbox, and then, you could just see a running tally of the drops…consistently. This number would have to stay, they couldn’t “clear” it weekly, monthly…etc.
But then, that would make more folks use inbox dropping.
I’ve been off the loop due to a tornado in our area, and hope to get back to my “consistent, regular dropper” status soon….
Linda: With over 12k accounts, that list could become quite long. I track that data myself exactly as you suggested. I renamed my bookmark folders 1,2-5,6-9,10-15,16-20,21-25,26-30. Now I move sites every 30 days to the folder they belong in, based upon the number of drops on me over the last 30 days. Sure, it would be great if Entrecard did something like this for me.
Okay, Turnip, you convinced me. I hate the bloody inbox anyway…..the thing simply is more time consuming and annoying. Down with the inbox! YAH!
You do realize I reserve the right to change my opinion once I discover the secret of the “Great Big Announcement”. My goal from day one was to get people to bookmark my site. One way to do that was to bookmark it for them, then call it a list and have them download and import it. If your goal is to build long lasting traffic, you better hope people are bookmarking your site one way or another.
I don’t know. I kind of like the inbox. I use it as one of many tools that I use for dropping.
I like to chain off of advertisements.
I like to search sites that I’m thinking of advertising and drop there.
I like to look at sites that are in my top droppers.
I like to look at sites that are advertising on me or that I’m advertising.
I like to mix up all of these, ignore any possible guilt, and try to discover new sites every day.
My two ecs….
Aldon
I rarely use the inbox feature to drop cards. Maybe once in a while most of the time I use the bookmarked blog and after that I will hop from one to another blog. Make my life easier
Having your own bookmarked folders works fine for me. It is not a rigid practice as I weed out the non reciprocating blogs and add blogs that do. Over time my daily drops return has increased twofold. As I am spending time doing 300 drops a day I expect a decent return for my effort and dropping from the inbox never achieved this.
Thanks for your daily drops on me by the way.
I believe someone has suggested to EC that we should know who were our droppers for that day and we can have an idea who is dropping regularly or not.
Just like many other members, I created my own list - My Serious Droppers which I think I already told you that you’re # now 239.
I monitor my list as close as possible and remove the least droppers, unless the blog is striking to read. Then I get replacement from my inbox.
By doing this, I am not only getting regular droppers but also made them interested to read my blog if they realize that I created a link for them.
In addition, I am not afraid to miss a day without dropping because somehow, my droppers on my list still drop.
But more importantly, I am creating a good bonding with them which is leading to increase my community at EC.
Thanks.
I bookmarked this site for the daily drop using my “nifty” blog. but sometimes,when I drop from this account, i can no longer drop using my other account, unless I use another pc.
I haven’t made the 300 drops. my best so far is around 150, and I averaged around 80/day; 40 from bookmarks, 40 from inbox and chain drops.
I kinda like the inbox as it certainly makes my life a lot easier. I don’t have the time to look for sites to drop on, so suffice to say I drop on those who drop on me. I agree with the 300 problem though, not that I srtive for 300 a day, the odd occasion where I do get that many drops I can only watch in frustration as the list grows and I cannot reciprocate.
My other issue with the new inbox is that it is far more memory intensive than the one just prior to the fire. This makes it difficult to chain drop.
I do have 2 other issues though, aside from the inbox that is, and the first is, if I purchase an add for 8 days or 7 days thats when I want it to show, not a day earlier or later. I use up all my credits on a daily basis and barley genenerate enough to buy adds on decent sites that I know will pay back.
Unfortunately I wind up with too many on some days and no credits to buy for the days I wanted in the first place.
Surley it cant be too difficult to ensure adds get placed for the advertised day.
Secondly I think the new add pricing sucks and is probably a ploy to get people to purchase credits rather than earn them.
Regardless of how the credits are aquired there are very few sites out there that give a fair return for the price paid.
I cannot see the logic of getting a return of 20 to 30 times less than what it cost you to purchase the add.
On that note I can honestly say I have purchased on the top ec site only to end up feeling cheated.
A week ago I had the good fortune of paying 256 to advertise on a site which generated 289 hits for the day, which, by the way was more than double the hits from a 2048 site which happened to be at the top of the rankings at the time.
I refuse to buy credits under the current system as my soul purpose for joining ec was to boost my traffic and rankings and in so doing sell more of the products I advertise.
Purchasing credits for adds that can never perform because they are too expensive makes no sense to me.
Chosing a particular day to advertise would be a nice feature. Maybe something to entice premium users?
As for return on value, you have to check out a site and look at their demographics. Just because others bid up a site’s ad cost, that doesn’t mean it is a good site to advertise on. 2cr sites give me huge numbers at times.
I made a list awhile back. Lately, I’ve noticed that it seems to be full of blogs that haven’t updated content in a really long time. Yet those guys still show up in my inbox nearly every day. I’m slowly but surely weeding them out of the list although I haven’t had time to add any new ones to it.
The rest of my drop time (and I don’t have time to drop 300 per day for both blogs as slow as the system’s been lately) I use a combination of new blogs that post to the introductions in the forum, blogs I want to advertise on and last, the inbox.
I still see the inbox as a useful tool at least for keeping track of who it is that’s visiting my site.
Some even leave comments.
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I did not know that only 300 sites get listed on my inbox each day. Nice informative article.
I go to my statistics and drop on the bloggers that drop the most on me. Then, I click through to their guests. If I have time, I try to go to my inbox and drop on familiar cards. I have 5 blogs to drop for, so I usually drop about 75-100 for each blog.
I like the inbox because if I have time, I want to reciprocate. If you go to the inbox on the EC site, you can see drops by day.
One thing I have noticed is that several of my top droppers have quit EC because of issues. I hope this is not a trend.
It would be nice if we could store our “Faves” on entrecard so we can drop those in our faves first instead of writing it down or keeping a mental note. It would also be great to do a temp ban from seeing certain sites. For example there is this one site that has so many widgets that it crashes my browser when I load it and there is another site that redirects over and over again from blogger to the name server to blogger to the name server (or something like that) which just a number on my system resources. It would be nice to have a temp ban on those so that I don’t accidentally click on them and in a month or so I can second chance them.
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