Widget scanning

Well, I added widget scanning on Entrecard today. Basically it's a system that verifies that the user is actually displaying the widget. It was fun to code, but it was a bit of a shame it became necessary.

At first I thought we could get away with something that simply gently reminded the user that they didn't have the widget up but it seems that people didn't really respond to that.

The main reason why it's a problem is that without the widget on display, other people might still spend credits to get an ad on your widget..and get nothing for it.

So, scanner. All it does is prevent users with no widget on their site from showing up in the category browser, so nobody will accidentally run an ad on them. Hopefully the interface is fairly friendly and you should be able to restore category visibility within about 2 minutes of putting the widget back up.

It'll be interesting to see how it affects our widget stats.

It's also interesting to see that the economy may be a little..liquid..ie, people who've been working at it even a little bit have plenty of credits and advertising slots are going like crazy, a few of the more popular people are maxed out already. We have some ideas about how to deal with that - will be looking into it next week. Thanks to everyone who has dropped on the widget, nice to see you all :)