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Ad serving disabled on forum

rady

9:29 am on Apr 17, 2012 (gmt 0)

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Ok, ok, i know this has been talked over and over again but i couldn't find a relevant response.

So what happened: i run a sports website that features a pretty neat community (circa 200k posts). The board is lightly moderated and 90% of the cases we talk about our team but sometimes the talk goes either a little bit too hard or a bit off topic. I do however have a filter that censors any curse words that i set but two days ago i received the notification from google that ad serving to my website has been disabled (the account is still active and the ads still run on my other websites) due to a topic where images of sexy women (no nudity however) were posted. I immediately deleted the thread but i'm a bit afraid to reapply for verification because i'm pretty sure if they scrap the forum they can find other similar posts.

So what i did today was installing a few plugins that removed any images (either used in posts with the IMG tag or as attachements), all the signatures and all the external links, not only for guests but also for the newly registered users that haven't reached the required number of posts to gain full access.

Basically anyone who goes to the forum now and is not an approved member cannot see any images or links, while the curse words have always been censored.

Question is, are these measures enough to have my ads re-enabled or i should just forget about it and find other advertisers? :(

netmeg

2:30 pm on Apr 17, 2012 (gmt 0)

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Personally I've never thought forums and AdSense were a good combination. Too much potential to go wrong. If you get good traffic, on a sports forum, you might want to look for a different type of advertiser.

motorhaven

12:54 am on Apr 23, 2012 (gmt 0)

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I made a lot of money with Adsense and a forum for several years (since sold the forum). Tight and fast moderation takes care of potential issues. Though we never had problems with Google I never relied solely on it, because I'm not about putting all my eggs in one basket. We had multiple ad networks, affiliate programs and over 100 direct sponsors.

I will say our case wasn't the normal Adsense advertiser. We displayed more ads per day than most forums do per month, had a direct rep working with us (including beta programs), were allowed to customize the Adsense code such as changing the Javascript to adjust ad size to screen size, etc.

rady

6:23 am on Apr 23, 2012 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

I understand, still, the question is: by blocking images and outbound links (95% of them adsense safe) for the unregistered users will it help my case to get my ads re-enabled?

motorhaven

12:38 pm on Apr 23, 2012 (gmt 0)

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It may help but unfortunately there is no cut and dry answer. I've seen Google do everything from being helpful and communicative, getting an account re-enabled to utter silence from them.

Personally, I wouldn't disable outbound links completely. I choose to block images and links in posts from new users until they meet a certain threshold in the number of posts and/or time they've been on a site. This has the added benefit of stopping any spammers who slip through anti-spam registration checks.

Additionally, I'd recommend if 5% of your user's outbound links aren't Adsense safe, you may want to spend some time going through links and culling those out. Start with searching for ".cn", ".in", ".info" and ".biz", then the .com/.net links.

rady

12:53 pm on Apr 23, 2012 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

Links are generally ok, probably all of them go to blogs or media. Once in a while there's a NSFW image embeded or a link straight to an image.. that's why i decided to block all the links and images that could be read by the normal unregistered user

Lame_Wolf

1:05 pm on Apr 23, 2012 (gmt 0)

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what about copyrighted images ?

AdSenseGuru4711

8:28 am on Apr 30, 2012 (gmt 0)

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@rady, your measures are enough. Word filters should do the trick. Stick to Adense, also take care when using the Google Image API to source images from other sites, some people do not like their images to be crawled and displayed on other sites and may puposely exchange their images for #*$!. - Your Issue: AdSense is FAMILYSAFE that means, everthing that is considered NOT FAMILSAFE - which you would not show your 6 year old son/nephew could be a problem.

@LameWolf. that is no problem.

martinibuster

9:42 am on Apr 30, 2012 (gmt 0)

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The board is lightly moderated...

One of the most common issues forum owners run into. Once those expectations of "free speech" are established it can take years to undo. You have to make a choice, do you want income or do you want to give people their "freedom of speech" to post photos that are more or less off topic to your topic (autos)?

Like any business, you have to set ground rules. No shirt, no shoes, no service and all that.