Hey Guys, I just wanted to give everyone a head's up to something I have just seen, and never seen before -- a new attempt at sabotaging a strangers adsense account. My friend runs a forum, on a computer game called World of Warcraft - It is a player verse player game, with two teams. The teams can not interact in any way other then fighting, so it is very easy for personal grudges to form between people on the opposite team -- I.E. someone kills you over and over for hours cause they feel like it and you can't get away. So anyway, he runs a forum for his guild in this game, and he had adsense ads set up to be under the first post -- a leaderboard. Someone posted on every post that didnt have any replies yet the following : "Please click the google ad's above this post, to help support our guild and our forums, clicking the ad's will be rewarded with access to our private forums" It was noticed pretty fast and the person was banned, but im sure this guy wasn't the first to attempt this. I wanted to let everyone know, so if you have a un-moderated forum with your adsense on it, I would keep my eye out for something like this. There are some strange people in the world who seem to "get off" from behavior like this.
Well BuildHome, things is not that simple. Just to point out a simple scenario, If I have a forum, register for a member account is such an easy job to do. So you cannot tell Google that that account does not belong to you. If you are banned and off you go. I wonder why this guy chose a very slow and obvious "weapon" to kill your friend. There is one better known method is bomb click that ads which makes the account dies sooner than just keep posting such stupid posts and then get banned from accessing the forum. But anyway, this is an alert for every hardworking and honest webmasters .... like me! he he
Well, you should never have Adsense ads on a forum that is not extremely well moderated and checked everyday for irregularities. As the webmaster you are responsible for all the content that is on your site. If your members get free reign there's a lot of damage they can do... especially on forums!
IMO, the best thing to do for forums is to sell your own advertising. Because CTR is so low, it may be best to charge a monthly rate for sponsorships on your forums.
interesting topic... what if someone put "please click on ads to support the site" in there signature ? would eveyone who started the threads using the sharing system get banned including dp?
I doubt that Google will ban people right out for something as this. Hopefully they will just send a warning letter to the site owner first. Luckily I highly doubt that the moderators here will allow something like that going unnoticed for more than a few minutes.