Topic: Google's customer service is a joke

[Cools!]

As some of you know I work on a community festival that takes place in the summer. A few years back I setup an Adsense account so I can become a partner on YouTube and get more benefits (like upload video clips longer than 10-12 minutes). I only had one video that had actual Google ads running on it that generated a few bucks every month. So a few months back I decided to put up Adsense ads on the festival website as well, along with my personal photo site.

I got one payment (just a bit more than $100). Then, out of nowhere, my account got disabled, along with a much bigger payment because the site was becoming more popular. No warning, no explanation, done, closed. I tried to go through their appeal process, nothing happened. Not to mention that because you have to have an Adsense account to be a YouTube partner the closure fucked up my YouTube account and I lost my partnership status.

So I create a new account so I can at least link my YouTube account to that and maybe I can get partner status again. Well... to this day I'm waiting for a reply from their customer service and can't access parts of my account as a result. Then 2 weeks ago I try to put a few ads again on the website. Well, the account got disabled just now. I got maybe 2-3 ad clicks during that time. Again, no reason, no warning, nothing, all I got was this:

While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense
account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since
keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage
our advertisers in the future, we've decided to disable your account.

What kind of risk could a community website pose?

So... ahem... FUCK YOU GOOGLE.

[shock]

I remember that my undergrad used a Gmail account as a our public email address.  It worked great most of the time, but Google shut it down a few days before our big "opening" because we were sending and receiving hundreds and hundreds of emails over the course of a few hours (there were like 20 people in the account at once).

They shut it down for a few days because they thought it was a spam account and wouldn't turn it back on in the interim.  Needless to say, it was baaaaad.

[gpw11]

I remember that my undergrad used a Gmail account as a our public email address.  It worked great most of the time, but Google shut it down a few days before our big "opening" because we were sending and receiving hundreds and hundreds of emails over the course of a few hours (there were like 20 people in the account at once).

They shut it down for a few days because they thought it was a spam account and wouldn't turn it back on in the interim.  Needless to say, it was baaaaad.

That's something I can kind of understand and maybe even appreciate.  I mean, it sucks for you guys, but you have to kind of see where they're coming from.  Cools' shit though?  I might be missing something but no (real) explanation or anything?  Horrible customer service and PR. 

[iPPi]

I worked for a major telecommunications company last year doing a lot of coding, and most coders do lots of Google searches on certain keywords to see what a good way of implementing a particular feature was.

Since basically all the searches were going through one IP address (in a single office building I would think there were about 250+ developers), some of the searches made Google think our IP was a spam bot and required a captcha or a timed delay before giving a result.

It was kind of annoying.

[Cools!]

At least they didn't block you.

It's the lack of any sort of warning that annoys me. At least provide some sort of reason because at this point I still have no idea what went wrong. Did someone click on the ads too much? I could've blocked the ads from appearing for them. Did the site serve too many ads? I could've reduced the pages serving the ads. Etc. I have no clue right now. Their process gives too much power to their advertisers and even those that click because for all I know someone with a grudge can go on your site, spam the ads, and next day you lose your account.

[scottws]

Yeah, Google doesn't really have customer service.  A lot of people noticed that during the Google+ rollout.

I don't really get why they blocked you.  If you ever find out, let me know.