What Happened to E-Referrer?
For more than 4 years I used e-referrer.com in my sidebar to inform my readers where most of my traffic was coming from, see my article Referrer Lists for your Blog. Amazingly, for a free service it worked remarkably well and did exactly what it promised to do.
Sadly, the site went down a few months ago and I have been waiting for it to come back up. Someone representing himself to be in charge of the site left a message on an Internet Marketing Forum indicating that it would soon be back (1); but months have gone by since then and connections to the url continue to time out.
Websites are not unlike brick and mortar retail stores. You find a great bagel place, you go in every day, eat an everything bagel with cream cheese, sausage and egg (I know, it sounds horrible - but it's tasty), get to know the owners well and then one day the doors are locked, the place is empty, and if you're lucky there's a note on the door saying thanks to everyone for being a customer all these years but it was time to close.
Sometimes you know they're going to close shop and you get a chance to say goodbye.
Sometimes you know they're going to close shop and can't bring yourself to go in and say goodbye.
ENDNOTES
(1):
The Warrior Forum, 14 Oct 2013, E-referrer.com dead?
I was alerted about a thread asking about this yesterday, and even though it is a very old thread I thought I'd speak up and at least respond. Had I seen this previously I would have replied then, I apologize.
It was a very bad week. I co-own a design and development studio. We had two very large, multi-year projects coming to completion during this time, and we just simply did not have the manpower to keep everything running. The truth it, we didn't know it was down. Our alert system failed. We have a company we pay to alert us of ping/connectivity issues and we never got notice. Normally it wouldn't matter, as we check the site frequently, but we just simply missed it, and I apologize sincerely.
E-referrrer was a proof of concept project I started. it was never intended to be a real, long term website. However, since we've had such an enormous response and continue to get over 150 new signups per day, we have decided to add a project for a rebuild. the whole website for e-referrer is going to be redeployed. The system functions won't change, and everything you do now will remain, and it will remain free. but we will have a real website (we are building it now) and much more to do in the back end. Including all sorts of reporting options, and visual information to help you.
As I said, this site was never really meant to be live long term. But it got so big so fast I left it online. As time went on it got too big for the server it was on (a shared server) and for the last couple years it's been runing on it's own dedicated server with massive resources to make sure it can handle the traffic.
I do hope you didn't leave, and still use our service. it's truly a free service. We don't even offer a paid version, paid upgrades etc. And we make no money on the site. it's there strictly because people seemed to like it, and obviously, with that many users, it's something people want. In fact, i pay for the server it's running on out of pocket. On the new site we're hoping we can find a revenue stream in advertising on the site itself (not the lists) but i don't know for sure i want to do much of that. It's already doing minimal adsense, but it pays for less than 5% of the cost of the server.
Keep an eye out, I will be posting news on the site when we are about to deploy the new system. I can't browser forums and respond to questions much, but if you have a question or need help, send me a PM here and I will get an email.
Thanks for your interest, and again I apologize for the downtime. in 6 years that's the longest we've been down by far. We've maintained a 99.999% uptime for 9 years now.
Thank you.
John
Then a month later I found another item - someone calling himself ereferrer filed a complaint with Adblock Plus, a service that blocks annoying ads on the web as well as blocking other things such as tracking. Ereferrer denied his site did any tracking but merely posted real-time reciprocal links and no other information and asked that his site, www.e-referrer.com, be delisted from their blocking:
adblockplus.org/forum, 6 Nov 2013, Assist in getting de-listed
I wasn't able to locate the appropriate forum for this so i'll submit it here.
We've been running a referrer script for years, it's a chezy, terrible looking little site that gets massive traffic and 150 new signups per day.
recently we started getting noticed that it's no longer working, and the issue has come to light that people with adblock no longer see the lists.
I'd like to find out why. Our lists have absolutely no advertisements of any kind i them. What this script does is sit on a website. when a referring hit comes in, it logs it, turns around and lists it back in a single unordered list on the user's site as a hyperlink. It's built strictly for the user to post real-time reciprocal links. but we have never included ads of any kind on the user lists. in fact, we make no money off the site. Actually it's the opposite. I pay out of pocket for the servers we run to handle the traffic.
it's non-intrusive and has no interruption of any kind.
How do i go about possibly getting delisted? I'm not sure how to get unlisted as I don't see any links referring to that on your site. I see bug reports, but this wouldn't appear to be a bug. more along the lines of a removal request. So in order to not post in the wrong place I figured the filter list would be the closest thing I could think of.
if there is a more appropriate place to submit this request could you please let me know? my website is www.e-referrer.com and I can be contacted by PM.
if someone has a link to a place I can submit for removal I would be very appreciative.
