Suspended by Google Adsense

[Bram Hengeveld]

Its that time of the year again. Google has banned our adsense account which leaves RaceDepartment basically without any income apart from our generous donators/premium members and sponsor.

One of the F1 2012 mods is probably classed by a Googlebot as a Formula 1 copyright violation which has now caused our ads to be disabled until a successful appeal has been made.

I have filed an appeal of course but solving this might take days/weeks and we are not in the position to loose out of income this long. Especially with double server costs this month because of the server migration that has just been finalized this can't happen at a worse possible time that now.

In the worst case scenario, God forbid, they won't re-able our account, which means that also the income of the previous month of November will not be paid.

Horrible way to end the week and a big risk for the future of RaceDepartment.com if they decide not to re-enable our account.

If you can spare a few coins to avoid us going offline at the end of the month do please help us out by purchasing a premium membership package here.

 

[Dinca Andrei]

Damn,bad news for everyone....i hope it will not turn in to a disaster

 

[Bram Hengeveld]

Its the third time in two years this happens and in previous cases we made a successful appeal as their claim wasn't right at all (most likely executed by a bot browsing forums).

But i hope that they don't use the three strikes is out principle as in that case we are really into big problems.

Now working on a temporary backup solution to minimize the damage.

 

[Peter]

Sad to here, especially for existing Premium members as a can find a way to make an extra donation.

 

[Bram Hengeveld]

You don't need to Peter as you have done MORE than we can ask for already.

Its a community effort and with 3.5 million page views a month you'd reckon that we are not the only visitors around here

 

[Calum McLure]

I'm going to renew my membership when it runs out on the 28th, hopefully that is not too late.

 

[Dinca Andrei]

I like been here!!!!

 

[ParkYongLee]

What a bad joke, for god damn's sake. It's not like this mod exists since ... when? Google bots, jesus christ. Hopefully we can get back running adsense AND reopening the mod. And let's hope, there won't be even more of those bollocks copyright violation claims. It could ruin the forum in two ways.

Google bots are even worse than a chinese antivirus program giving false alerts.

 

[Ole Marius Myrvold]

First I thought this was a random "damn you youtube and new rules - thread".

But ye, there are more things like Google Adsense out there?

 

[Bram Hengeveld]

Got an answer to our appeal and I can't believe what I am reading:

<snippet>
"We received your appeal request but we noticed that the URL submitted in the form leads to a page that doesn't have any AdSense ad code on it."

So basically they expect that suspended sites leave the ad codes on the pages so all it does is showing empty white blocks with nothing in it. Yeah thats userfriendly indeed

Re-submitting!

 

[TheHemps]

Its that time of the year again. Google has banned our adsense account which leaves RaceDepartment basically without any income apart from our generous donators/premium members and sponsor.

One of the F1 2012 mods is probably classed by a Googlebot as a Formula 1 copyright violation which has now caused our ads to be disabled until a successful appeal has been made.

I have filed an appeal of course but solving this might take days/weeks and we are not in the position to loose out of income this long. Especially with double server costs this month because of the server migration that has just been finalized this can't happen at a worse possible time that now.

In the worst case scenario, God forbid, they won't re-able our account, which means that also the income of the previous month of November will not be paid.

Horrible way to end the week and a big risk for the future of RaceDepartment.com if they decide not to re-enable our account.

If you can spare a few coins to avoid us going offline at the end of the month do please help us out by purchasing a premium membership package here.

http://www.chitika.com/publishers/apply

This is, in my opinion, the best alternative......

Why anyone would want to do business with Google anyway is beyond me...I know they're the biggest but they are far from the best, unless it's at search engines.

Will renew membership on Tuesday

 

[Dennis]

Why anyone would want to do business with Google anyway is beyond me...

Chitika is great for US and Canada, but in other countries there are very few advertisers so the payout and clicks are a lot lower than with AdSense (at least that's my experience so far)

 

[Bram Hengeveld]

Mine as well Dennis,

 

[Craig Stevenson]

Been meaning to go Premium for years, finally got round to after seeing this yesterday.

 

[oldwolf]

Do I have to be a licensed member to become premium?

 

[4 8 15 16 23 42 108]

No, you can just stay with your nick; just like Eyghon-RD above your post

 

[Bram Hengeveld]

Good news, appeal was successful and our account is reinstated. Lets hope this doesn't happen again in the future.

 

[Justin Swan]

Great news Bram

 

[Jeffry in t Veld]

Here's your Christmas present from me, went premium.

Btw, what mod did they flag as copyrighted?

 

[Andreas Löffler]

Nice to hear , i upgraded as well as Thank You for all the great simracing years i had here at RD .