.. at least according to Google.

Some of you may notice we're not showing ads on plus613 anymore. This is because Google, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that the site is full of "sexually arousing" and "morally objectionable" material.

To give the lowdown, they emailed about 3-4 weeks ago with an image URL and said it breaks their terms of service. Most of you have probably seen it, it was that picture of a woman waving a Brasilian flag in Carnaval, with a bit of camel toe showing. Seriously, nothing major. Not porn or anything.

Anyway, we did what was demanded, and removed the picture. If you looked around online it's probably not all that hard to find, including on other Google affiliated sites, but whatever, we removed it as you can see if you go to [plus613.net]. Three weeks passed and I heard nothing, until I received an email saying that my account with Google had been deactivated due to non-compliance.

So that's great. There appears to be no significant appeal process, the funds I did have in the account are now locked up in there, and this is all just a pain. The sites have been losing money for years, especially since we outgrew all the shared/affordable server rental hosting places and had to purchase and colocate our own server hardware. At the rate of income we had, it'd take around 10 years just to pay off the database server alone.

I don't mind pouring money into this pit, but it just really annoys me when things like this happen. We've done all the right things in the past, we split the porn off the site so that we could do advertising etc to try and simply have the sites pay their own way, but still we have problems. I'm sure most of you remember the MULTIPLE PayPal arguments I've had over the years for pretty similar reasons.

I really had a hope of the sites being self sufficient. With the help of moderators and advertising, I really need the sites to look after themselves. DK and I don't have the time to look after it all anymore, the only reason they're still running at all is because we don't want to kill the great little community we've got going here. But we started running these things when we were in our early 20s. We're both in our 30s now, real life has taken over, jobs, weddings, houses, the usual stuff.

Sigh.

</rant>

sorry pulse, we'll try to be less depraved...

yeah. there's no "sexually arousing" or "morally objectionable" material on google videos.

Just change the site to pulse614 and apply for a new google account.

Yeah.. I'm not too fussed, we made fuck all from them anyway (about $10 a month) however it just pisses me off that in this case they're judge, jury and executioner, despite the fact that I made the change they requested AND there is no appeals process.

They're also sitting on about $80 that belongs to me, which also annoys me because damn it I want it and they don't need it.

I'm not too fussed about returning it to ad-free status, but it would've been nice to be able to get the sites to the point where they could pay for themselves.

Pulse, this is quite comical. Anytime I've wanted to find plus/porn613 I use Google. In fact, still works to this day. D'OH!

Bully on Google.

Yeah they still index the site, just won't advertise on it.

I find it suspicious though that ONE google ad works on the site when I'm browsing it, and it's an ad for one of the companies that hosts some of our data. I'm wondering if somehow they're doing something sneaky but I don't see how they possibly could.

Maybe they've paid to advertise on here?

Or i setup the ad to appear in the rotation....

The hosting one? Do we get anything for it?

Free hosting..

Hrm fair enough. They billed me yesterday. I didn't realise they offered such a thing, I assume it works on some kind of credit?

indeed

I'm still waiting on my case of beer that you guys promised me two years back;(

DK will get right on that for you!

i'd like a case of crabs...the long legged ones.

DK can give you crabs, too

how do they always seem to be able to stuff that rubber crab meat in those legs at the chinese buffet? is that a trade secret?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 14/02/2011 05:30AM by fossil_digger.

Thought you knew everything fossil!

top_list is borked again.
Oh, and first forum post of 2023 bitches!

Yeah the cleanup job for toplist doesn't run anymore since things moved to new hardware and I don't remember how it worked.

Shit keeps running out of disk space too which adds to the fun. I'm considering changing the hosting structure to basically do it for free, and kill the porn site once and for all.

That's all over my head. Back in the day a simple cron job would take care of it.
I bet it's a DK's fault.

Yup, it was always a cron job. I just don't remember what the cron job did

crontab -r

All long gone with hardware moves etc. It was all built from scratch, migrated to Docker containers etc with waaaaay more powerful hardware. That clearly slipped through the gaps. I presume DK knows how it ran but he's dead and/or a jerk. So yeah NFI how that stuff worked anymore.

Anyway yeah I think it's time to migrate away from paid hosting for servers and move back to VMs. That's probably my project for this year, save a couple of hundred $ USD per month on hosting the site.

Don't forget to update the IOTW too.