Re:Ask HN: What options, if any, do you have when Google ban...
by kjrose on Monday April 26, 2021 @10:59AM
(#26943189)
Yes, they appealed and it got changed from "Counterfeiting" to "Circumventing Systems." Then it took about 3 months and they sent a "Yes, you are still in violation" form email that doesn't give any clue as to why or what is going on. As well, it says that they are banned permanently from Google Ads so any further accounts they set up will be instantly banned.
Which seems a bit drastic when they don't even know what they did.
Re:Ask HN: What options, if any, do you have when Google ban...
by bad_username on Monday April 26, 2021 @04:16PM
(#26947501)
> they appealed and it got changed... Then they sent a "Yes, you are still in violation"
It is hard to figure out what happened when everybody is "they". I don't think using "he" or "she" would do any harm here.
Re:Ask HN: What options, if any, do you have when Google ban...
by gameman144 on Thursday April 29, 2021 @03:47AM
(#26978456)
"They" is the proper method for referring to a singular person of unspecified gender. In this case, since we don't know the gender of the person in question, using "they" is appropriate. If we knew the gender, then a gender-specific pronoun could be called for.
from what you describe (they are not tech savvy, and when you looked everything was fine), it sounds like the site was compromised at some point. It could be compromised now, but maybe only shows the hacked content (with counterfeit goods) to certain visitors (e.g. normal content when you type the address directly and hacked version when the referrer is Google search or ad). This is a common technique so that the site owner doesn't see the hack.