Today’s the day that I will depart from the service that took the blogosphere by storm over a year ago. The service, Entrecard, helps smaller blogs gain exposure by advertising on blogs for a small fee: with Entrecard Credits. The Entrecard widget has been on this blog since December 2007. As of this post, it will be no more.

For a few months, I’ve thought over about getting rid of the widget after many popular bloggers ditched it for better things, and some considered Entrecard to be a waste of time due to the fact that in order to gain a lot of advertisers, or visa versa, you need to drop as many cards as possible. That changed when the services made changes, making hardcore droppers cut back on dropping, or giving up the service altogether.

I’ve blogged about Entrecard in the past… there was even an Entrecard contest, which was this blog’s very first giveaway since starting it in 2007. Several months later, I evaluated the service and decided to stick with Entrecard for as long as possible to help out other bloggers, especially those with Anime and Otaku blogs. ^_^

That promise didn’t seem to last long as I thought it would. I would have stayed longer if didn’t run into any problems. These “problems” I came across influenced me to give up Entrecard; A popular member from Entrecard, Turnip, was banned for a tweet sent over Twitter that was “hurtful” to the Entrecard community–most importantly, the founder of Entrecard. Although he said something that was clearly against Entrecard’s Terms of Service, he was banned–without warning–just for mentioning it on another service… making the ban “illegal” in the case of Twitter’s ToS.

Another Entrecard user and fellow blogger, BaseGuardian, was removed from Entrecard as well for “not having a blog”, though it was clearly a blog, and running on WordPress.

It’s things like that that made my decision to leave Entrecard. Whether anyone did or did not break the rules, under certain circumstances, it’s not a way to run a business without through investigation. Other than strange business practices, my least decision to leave Entrecard is the growing number of Splog and Warez sites showing up in the directory. Previously, blog quality was hardly the issue. I wish it didn’t have to come to this, but if that’s how the admins are going to treat loyal members, then it’s best to leave before they kick me out themselves.