4 ms·

What's the moral imperative that Google is overlooking? To patiently explain to somebody trying to game your system exactly which behaviors tipped you off?

davidw 17y ago
If you simply cut people off, no questions, no appeal, no nothing, you will cull a certain number of innocent people. I can't be certain this guy falls into that category, but it seems lame to not try and settle things amicably in cases where there is a good faith effort to comply. It's just more of their crappy customer service. Remember when axod got the axe a while back? No explanations, no appeal, no contact, no nothing. They did reinstate him, but it took them quite a while. Expanding on this a bit, I think the 'pick a link' pictured in the image above was definitely grounds for not getting his money. On the other hand, what happens if you have some kind of user generated content, and someone writes the magic words... and you have ads on the page: http://twitter.com/davidnwelton/status/2093274918 http://twitter.com/davidnwelton/status/2093274918 Edit: one "good faith effort to comply" might be this: Google says your page is in violation of their terms, and needs changing (perhaps omitting the exact details), and that earnings from it will not be paid. You have the option to accept that, fix your page, and get on with things. Something like that might go a long ways to sort out the wheat from the chaff.
- Retric 17y ago
  Comming up with a reasonable excuse that you might not be a slimeball is not that hard. Dealing with such people is a waste of time. Tipping people off as to why you think they are a slimeball is also a bad idea. PS: Never asume everyone at a large company knows what everyone else is doing.
  - davidw 17y ago
    Yeah, I can appreciate that it's not easy, and that there are doubtless legions of slimeballs trying to screw Google and their advertisers over. But when Google screws over an innocent person, that's pretty lame too.
  - thorax 17y ago
    In this case, they kept enough of the guy's earnings to afford to pay someone to send him a better email.
- kragen 17y ago
  Yes, they hit innocent people sometimes, but this guy is clearly not in that category!
mnemonicsloth 17y ago
This looks like bad faith argumentation to me. Altering a few of your word choices, we get: How was Google supposed to act here? To patiently explain to one of its customers how to use the right Google service for the job he wants to do?
- michael_dorfman 17y ago
  Except that in this case, "the job that he wants to do" (AdSense for parked domains) is explicitly prohibited by the TOS. I don't think Google is the one acting in bad faith.
  - davidw 17y ago
    As a data point - is it possible in AdWords to exclude 'Adsense for Domains'? I didn't see anything like it in a quick look around, but there are a lot of settings. I'm guessing it's there somewhere. Is it on by default? Off by default? (I really don't know; it's not a rhetorical question, but it would be germane to the discussion) The thing that gets people's sympathy is that Google set up a system to do exactly what he wanted to do a few days later. Couldn't they have struck a deal?
    - billswift 17y ago
      Maybe they could have if he hadn't been such a jerk about it. Note that I'm just going by what he wrote in the article directly linked, I didn't think it worth the time going back through his earlier articles, since the last one HE wrote about it made himself look a bit of a jerk.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]

davidw 17y ago

If you simply cut people off, no questions, no appeal, no nothing, you will cull a certain number of innocent people. I can't be certain this guy falls into that category, but it seems lame to not try and settle things amicably in cases where there is a good faith effort to comply. It's just more of their crappy customer service. Remember when axod got the axe a while back? No explanations, no appeal, no contact, no nothing. They did reinstate him, but it took them quite a while. Expanding on this a bit, I think the 'pick a link' pictured in the image above was definitely grounds for not getting his money. On the other hand, what happens if you have some kind of user generated content, and someone writes the magic words... and you have ads on the page: http://twitter.com/davidnwelton/status/2093274918 http://twitter.com/davidnwelton/status/2093274918 Edit: one "good faith effort to comply" might be this: Google says your page is in violation of their terms, and needs changing (perhaps omitting the exact details), and that earnings from it will not be paid. You have the option to accept that, fix your page, and get on with things. Something like that might go a long ways to sort out the wheat from the chaff.

Retric 17y ago
Comming up with a reasonable excuse that you might not be a slimeball is not that hard. Dealing with such people is a waste of time. Tipping people off as to why you think they are a slimeball is also a bad idea. PS: Never asume everyone at a large company knows what everyone else is doing.
- davidw 17y ago
  Yeah, I can appreciate that it's not easy, and that there are doubtless legions of slimeballs trying to screw Google and their advertisers over. But when Google screws over an innocent person, that's pretty lame too.
- thorax 17y ago
  In this case, they kept enough of the guy's earnings to afford to pay someone to send him a better email.
kragen 17y ago
Yes, they hit innocent people sometimes, but this guy is clearly not in that category!

mnemonicsloth 17y ago

This looks like bad faith argumentation to me. Altering a few of your word choices, we get: How was Google supposed to act here? To patiently explain to one of its customers how to use the right Google service for the job he wants to do?

michael_dorfman 17y ago
Except that in this case, "the job that he wants to do" (AdSense for parked domains) is explicitly prohibited by the TOS. I don't think Google is the one acting in bad faith.
- davidw 17y ago
  As a data point - is it possible in AdWords to exclude 'Adsense for Domains'? I didn't see anything like it in a quick look around, but there are a lot of settings. I'm guessing it's there somewhere. Is it on by default? Off by default? (I really don't know; it's not a rhetorical question, but it would be germane to the discussion) The thing that gets people's sympathy is that Google set up a system to do exactly what he wanted to do a few days later. Couldn't they have struck a deal?
  - billswift 17y ago
    Maybe they could have if he hadn't been such a jerk about it. Note that I'm just going by what he wrote in the article directly linked, I didn't think it worth the time going back through his earlier articles, since the last one HE wrote about it made himself look a bit of a jerk.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]