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Comment by deanclatworthy | Hacker News Reader

I couldn't agree more with this article. I was banned from adsense yesterday for embedding advertisements on a mobile application or within a third-party toolbar (neither of which I have ever done, and have analytics to prove it). In the email they sent to inform me that I was banned, they including a link to an appeal form. This sounded reasonable, until after submitting my appeal I received an automatic reject ion within a minute of submission. No human could have possibly read, let alone reviewed the evidence I submitted.

There's simply no avenue for me to appeal now, and furthermore I cannot use the platform ever again.

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Same, I was banned for invalid click activity a while back, appealed with an offer of turning over any data they needed to prove I was not involved in it. I never clicked one of my own ads intentionally and only accidentally did once (and something on their site at the time said not to worry about it if you accidentally did it once), and the appeal still got rejected shortly after. This not only locked me out of AdSense forever, it broke other Google products for me that had been tied into AdSense.

Feedburner, for example, didn't let you disable ads in your feed once you've been banned by AdSense. (I haven't checked since to see if this is still the case.) So unless you deleted the feed entirely and recreated it (losing all related settings statistics, etc.) you still had ads on all your feed items, but you weren't getting paid for them.

Curiously, they did this when I was finally only a few dollars away from my initial payout of $100.

Now, of course, I can never participate in YouTube's monetization program either.

Had a similar experience. In fact, due to large enough ad traffic, we were assigned to an actual contact in the past, who had repeatedly ensured us that our setup was valid. Then a few months ago all of a sudden our account was banned. After two appeals asking for what could possibly be causing "invalid activity" (if there was, it was certainly not coming from us), we were told not to contact them again.

This is sadly something that can be done by your competitors. Blackhats have tools to bomb you with ad clicks that follow obvious patterns. I've seen multiple cases of people complaining about this whilst research ways to appeal my ban last night.

If you think just adding people will solve the problem, you've never called Virgin Mobile's support line.

Hey, is this Dean from vbulletin.org? I don't know if you remember me. Just thought I'd say "Hi."

'Tis I

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