Deleted from Entrecard!

I had the biggest shock of my blogging life today when I received an email from Entrecard saying that my account for Wishing On A Falling Star has been deleted!!! Can you imagine me being ousted by EC? Me, the one who drops 300 cards almost daily, who advertises like mad on other people's blogs and who has been promoting EC to those who are not members yet?! What went wrong??? Here's the email.

Your account 'Wishing On A Falling Star' on entrecard.com has been deleted. The administrator gave the following reason:

Rule 11: Please contact support@entrecard.com if you remove the audio.

Please contact deleted@entrecard.com if you have any questions regarding this action.

It was about ten minutes away from breaking fast when I received the email and naturally, I was in no mood to break my fast. So I immediately wrote to the EC support team asking my account to be reinstated and this is what I wrote.

Hi there! I am the author of Wishing On A Falling Star and I received a very shocking email today informing me that my account has been deleted! I am hereby requesting for my EC account to be reinstated. Apparently I have defaulted rule 11 below, which I was totally unaware of seeing that I’ve come across many other blogs with the same audio content on their blogs.

Rule 11
No autoplaying audio: This includes music that plays automatically when you visit the page, or short audio ads that come up unannounced.

As requested, I have removed my audio widget for now and hope to get my account reinstated asap. My question however is will I still be able to have my audio widget back at my blog ON THE CONDITION that I set the widget to NOT be on autoplay? That means my music will no longer be on autoplay but will only be on when and if someone presses the play button. Do let me know if this is okay.

Thank you for your time and I hope to receive a favorable response from you asap! I have been a strong supporter of EC ever since day 1, so am really hoping for a favorable outcome from you. Thanks again!

Regards,
Mariuca

After breaking my fast (in a hurry too since I was too upset with my current predicament!), I quickly checked my email and was happy to receive immediate response from the EC Support Team. My account has been reinstated ... but at a certain cost, read on to find out exactly what!

This is the response received.

Hi, thanks for the update, your account has been reinstated.

It is absolutely fine to have music that only plays when someone clicks the Play button. This is a recent change in our quality standards, so until recently, sites with autoplaying audio were permitted.

We are communicating this in an email to all members in the next week or so. It has been announced on the Entrecard Blog and in the forums, but we will send an email to ensure everyone is aware.

Apologies for the inconvenience caused, and thanks once again for making the change so promptly.

Ben
--
Entrecard Support
Entrecard Help Guide

I was so relieved to hear that my EC account has been reinstated and quickly logged in to see the status of my account. Thank goodness my thousands of credits, which I've been working so hard to collect were still intact. However, I had another shock when I saw that my EC price had been somewhat reset and it had dropped drastically from 1024EC a day to a mere 4EC a day, which actually turned out well for those who seized this opportunity to quickly advertise with me at such a low price LOL! ;)

What horrified me the most however was when I realized that my list of advertisers who were lined up to advertise at my blog for the next 9 days or so was MISSING! That was a big downer for me since I couldn't remember my advertisers who already paid to advertise on my blog! I am truly sorry for this inconvenience and I apologize to all my advertisers. I did not see this coming and I sincerely hope this will not deter you from returning to advertise with Mariuca! Believe me when I say that I am just as upset about this as you are! :(

I would however, like to say thank you to the EC Support Team, especially to Ben who personally wrote me back, explaining the situation to me. Honestly, I was unaware of this new rule that EC has set forth for its users, so I would like to remind my readers who are also EC members, to please check out the updated EC rules so you can avoid the same thing from happening to you. I'd hate to see this happen to you or anyone else. Sigh! And to think that I was looking forward to a nice relaxing holiday today; what a shocker it turned out to be instead!