BlogExplosion: Death of a Giant?

Anyone who’s tried to log into Blog Explosion recently will have discovered – nothing, just a 503 message. Not even the forums are functioning now. It seems to have gone down the same road as BlogCrowd, Blogmad and Blog Soldiers.

I joined BE back in 2004/5. Looking back at my older posts I found some good friends there. Then I discovered that there was a backload of blogs waiting to be approved, which I did for two solid years. We managed to get them up to date twice during this period. Due to lack of administration the forums were inundated with all forms of very nasty spam. A dedicated team of members and I spent a lot of time posting to push the spam back; it was the only tool we had. Some people were writing on the forums that they weren’t receiving credits they had paid for. What to do?

In February 2009 we organized the writing of (real) letters to the company which owned BE. This eventually led to a new administrator being appointed. A volunteer who worked all over the site and dealt with support tickets as well as cleaning out the spam from the forums. His access was limited, but he did his best and for a little while everything was going well. Then he disappeared. I’m sure that he was banned from accessing the site for some reason.

A year later we were back to square one and the owners could not be contacted. I discovered that they weren’t paying some of their employees either. At this point some members came forward and said they would be interested in buying BE, but from who? Throughout this period surfing was difficult as the system wasn’t running properly. Someone tried to fix it but afterwards, credits weren’t allocated for surfing, the numbers to click on weren’t always there and I think this was when logging in became very touch and go too.

 In May 2010 a few of us got together and set up a new blog exchange: ExposeYourBlog!. However, I was still trying to approve the never ending backlog of blogs and keeping an eye on the forum on BE. As EYB! grew I spent less and less time trying to keep something going on BE.

A lot of our members migrated from BE. Thank you to everyone who supported BE in the past and those who support EYB! today.

 My posts on the story up until the end of 2010