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AdNonSense
For the past three years, I’ve been an AdSense publisher, displaying adverts on this website (at times) and on a number of other websites around the Internet. All of these websites have conformed to Google’s terms and conditions, and I’ve always revised the advertising displays as Google came up with modifications, new methods of advertising, etc.
Until Monday…
I awoke on Monday to this email, that many AdSense publishers have received:
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 have decided to disable your account.
Needless to say, I was quite shocked. Even from my ‘humble’ websites, I’ve made over $400 with Google AdSense in the past couple of years - notable income for a student - with $250 of that sitting in my account, waiting for a payout (I figure, if it’s in the AdSense account, I can’t spend it until I need it).
I appealed to Google, citing whatever evidence I could, protesting my innocence, and offering to co-operate with them in whatever way possible to ensure that the problematic activity was stopped. Reasonable enough, you’d have thought, for someone who they’ve had no problem with for 3 years, right? Wrong…
Thank you for providing us with additional information. However, after thoroughly reviewing your account data and taking your feedback into consideration, we have re-confirmed that your account poses a significant risk to our advertisers. For this reason, we are unable to reinstate your account. Thank you for your understanding.
A ’significant risk’ to their advertisers? Either they’ve been stringing me along for the past three years, or something fishy is going on. Canned responses.
I’ve sent them another message since, but they haven’t bothered to reply… and I don’t expect I’ll ever see the $250 that I’ve accumulated over the past 2 years, or so. They never sent a warning, never offered a reason, and for all I know, it could have been someone I dislike repeatedly clicking ads and getting my account banned. The worst of it is that I’ll never be allowed another AdSense account again.
From searching around, it’s not hard to find publishers in a similar position. Granted, a proportion of them have, in some way or other blatantly violated the terms, but there are plenty of others who have had their account disabled when they’ve reached a certain balance (around $250 seems to be common), or in the days leading up to a payout being due. Extraordinary behaviour, and it just goes to show that organisations like Google can get away with pretty much anything, without giving any rhyme or reason as to why. I’ve submitted complaints to Watchdog in the UK, but I doubt anything will ever get done about it.
The worst part of this? All the ad revenue all went to support non-profit entities in their server costs, domain costs, etc. Now all of that money needs to come from somewhere else.
Good job, Google.
Skype & Customer Service
Skype have seemingly fixed the bugs related to Skype 4 and the ASUS Xonar D2 card. Read more here. Thanks to Ivan for giving me the heads-up on this!
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to rectify a problem that I’ve encountered with the Skype 4 release, namely, it just doesn’t detect my sound card device. The device driver is installed properly, it’s a common sound card (ASUS Xonar D2), and there are no present driver conflicts on the system… yet Skype 4 only picks up the audio converter driver, but not the actual audio driver itself. The peculiarity is, of course, the Skype 3, 2 and 1 all pick up the device.
Presuming ths to be a bug of some description, or requiring some simple fix that I had yet to discover, I headed on over to the Skype website, about three weeks ago, and decided to send off a support request that said something along the lines of:
Hi, am having a problem with Skype 4, it won’t detect my sound card (but earlier versions of Skype do), any ideas? The card is an ASUS Xonar D2. Thanks in advance.
Simple, succinct, to the point.
Immediately following, I received the ‘mandatory’ auto-reponse, saying it would take them up to 48 hours to respond to queries, as they were under heavy load, and struggling to reply to all users’ queries within their normal 24 hour period. Fair enough.
Four days later, I got a reply:
Thank you for your understanding and patience. We advise that you upgrade to the latest Skype release.
You can check your Skype version in Skype->Help->About. Skype can be found here: http://www.skype.com/download/skype/windows/
The latest version includes up to date bug fixes and added features.
My enquiry was already about the latest version of their software… so I replied with a simple email stating that that was the case, and that previous versions worked with my sound card.
Fast forwarding a week, I got another reply:
If your USB device does not appear in the API (”Manage other programs”) access list, please check that:
- the USB port is working
- you have connected the phone to your PC
- you have installed the phone drivers correctlyIf the problem remains, please contact the device’s manufacturer as there might be a hardware problem with the device.
What USB device? Once again, an automated response, once again, nowhere near the mark. If all I’m getting is automated responses, why is it taking a week to respond?
By this point, I was getting a little terse:
This is nothing to do with a USB device, it’s to do with Skype v4 not detecting my sound card, even though it is correctly installed and Skype v3, v2, and v1 all have detected it before.
I’d appreciate an actual response, not canned responses based on keywords.
Thanks.
Finally, a response within 24 hours… will it be any use?
If your USB device does not appear in the API (”Manage other programs”) access list, please check that:
- the USB port is working
- you have connected the phone to your PC
- you have installed the phone drivers correctlyIf the problem remains, please contact the device’s manufacturer as there might be a hardware problem with the device.
Err… no.
The ‘conversation’ currently sits with this email, which I sent a week ago:
Sending me the same email as last time (which I said was way off-topic) does not help me at all.
This is really, really poor customer service.
I can’t believe how pathetic the customer service is. There’s no way to contact them directly, no significant contact details, no way to elevate your query and, seemingly, no way to get an actual human to respond to you. This is the epitome of abysmal customer service, and I really think they deserve to be named-and-shamed for this… it doesn’t cost anything to provide good customer service, in fact it’s a monetary benefit for the company involved. Not providing good customer service is nothing short of sheer laziness.
Rant over (for now). If anyone has any details for someone at Skype, I’d greatly appreciate if you could forward them to me…
Update: Received this this morning (27/02/2009)…
We are sorry to hear that you experience problems, however, it is good to hear that your problem is solved with an earlier version, we hope you continue to enjoy using Skype.
We deeply apologize for Skype 4.0, as some functions are still not working, however please check back to skype.com regulary for updates.
Not really the response I was looking for, but I guess it’s an improvement over telling me irrelevant things. Perhaps they shouldn’t have released Skype 4 if it didn’t work properly with one of the best-selling sound cards on the market?
A Sea of Experts
Consider, for a moment, the wonderful things that the Internet has done for us, as a global community: it has given us near-instantaneous communication, buying, selling, gaming, searching, archiving, broadcasting, and a great deal more. However, one of the most significant things that the Internet has given us is a sea of so-called experts… (I say ’so-called’, not in a way that is intended to suggest there are no true experts, but rather that there are many who claim expertise, but are, in fact, incompetant).
It’s very hard, these days, to be ‘outstanding’ in any particular area: everyone seems to be an expert in some particular field, or other. Quite why we, as the human race, have this inherent obsession with being ‘the expert’ on a particular topic, I’m not quite sure, but it is both saddening and dangerous for the technological community. “Why?”, you might ask - well, let’s consider…
These days, we pay so very little attention to sources of information, and the details and evidence behind them (we’re far too busy scanning our several hundred subscriptions in our feed readers to even think about reading into any particular detail), we lose track of all attribution and credibility of sources. A simple example of this is Wikipedia: whilst a great resource, it is frequently the downfall of many people who believe its information to be accurate, and reliable… neither of which is consistently the case. The anonymity of the Internet has given rise to a whole new breed of ‘expert’… a breed that appears more intelligent, and more reliable, than they actually are.
A prime example of the problem can be found within communities such as Twitter, where there are thousands of people promoting themselves as experts on everything from horticulture, to business startups. Some of these people will have formal qualifications, proven experience, and valid expertise that would, in an earlier time in history, still have got the job done… but most of those claiming to be experts are often no more credible than Joe Average who you met down the pub last week.
The difference? Well, it’s probably Google.
With the growth of Internet searching, has come the growth of this Internet phenomenon. Anyone and everyone can search the collective, archived, pool of human knowledge, and come up with a semi-reasonable answer to a question that, to the untrained ear, can seem like true expertise. The problem here, of course, lies in the fact that retaining information does not make you an expert… an expert exhibits both knowledge and wisdom of application of that knowledge, to provide an all-round, optimised and customised solution to the problem at hand.
The majority of so-called experts today, simply are not experts - they are wannabe, false prophets, who do more harm than good for those who are lulled into the trap of considering them to be of some significance, intelligence or importance.
A good example of this problem, and its solution, is summed up by an excerpt from an interview that David Parnas gave back in 1999 (emphasis mine):
Q: What is the most often-overlooked risk in software engineering?
A: Incompetent programmers. There are estimates that the number of programmers needed in the U.S. exceeds 200,000. This is entirely misleading. It is not a quantity problem; we have a quality problem. One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year. Hiring more bad programmers will just increase our perceived need for them. If we had more good programmers, and could easily identify them, we would need fewer, not more.
What this highlights, more than anything, is that we fail to recognise true potential when it arrives… we fail to understand the qualities that make up a true expert and, as such, we presume many different people to be experts in areas they have little or no expertise. What we need do is give credit where it’s due: credit our true experts, credit those who make phenomenal breakthroughs in science, technology, and other areas of our day-to-day lives… and be weary of those who might try to sell us their ‘talents’ without any reputable qualification, experience or achievement to back up those claims.