You get points just to be active surfing on Ecency too. Those we call heartbeats! There are many ways to earn points, sharing Ecency.com post link to Twitter or delegation, commenting, publishing etc.
Boosting is never guaranteed, try smaller amount and keep trying… our curators try to distribute votes more widely so they always looking for unique authors
Notification service fell behind on sync a bit, but everything was still functional, just with little delay. Nothing serious, are you still experiencing issues?