System Upgrade: Please Report Problems

[Mike Bobbitt]

Short answer: Yes.

 

[Bruce Monkhouse]

Short answer: Yes.

I thought we ran a pretty tight ship compared to most of the internet.....

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

So did I! I've cleaned up a bunch of "violations" but in many cases the Google Policy Centre just lists a megathread... how do you even figure out what they might have found objectionable in the 462-page A Deeply Fractured US thread lol. Not 100% sure on a way forward yet, but I can say with certainty that if I can't turn the advertising revenue tap back on, the ads will all go!

 

[PuckChaser]

@Mike Bobbitt Post what you need cleaned up in the moderator area as some of us are on leave and bored. There's stuff in those megathreads pre-rule changes that likely is getting flagged by AI algorithms.

 

[SeaKingTacco]

So did I! I've cleaned up a bunch of "violations" but in many cases the Google Policy Centre just lists a megathread... how do you even figure out what they might have found objectionable in the 462-page A Deeply Fractured US thread lol. Not 100% sure on a way forward yet, but I can say with certainty that if I can't turn the advertising revenue tap back on, the ads will all go!

Why not just nuke the whole mega thread?

Is it worth keeping if it causes this kind of trouble?

 

[kratz]

Why not just nuke the whole mega thread?

Is it worth keeping if it causes this kind of trouble?

With that kind of thinking you'll quickly be promoted to DS around here.

 

[PuckChaser]

Why not just nuke the whole mega thread?

Is it worth keeping if it causes this kind of trouble?

Most of the time the adsense stuff is picked up by AI, without human judgement. For instance, it picked up obscene language in our thread about folks giving N@zi salutes which was universally against those morons. There's a manual review process but we did a bunch of our own AI-enabled clean up to remove older threads (like 20 years ago old) that could have problematic posts.

I'm confident our new rules meet Google's policy thresholds and we're just playing whackamole with old content posted pre-rule changes.

 

[SeaKingTacco]

Only answer if you feel like it, but let me get this straight:

If google thinks you are not a fine, upstanding website, to their standards, they then allow Adsense to bombard readers of the website…because?

 

[PuckChaser]

Only answer if you feel like it, but let me get this straight:

If google thinks you are not a fine, upstanding website, to their standards, they then allow Adsense to bombard readers of the website…because?

Might be more up Mike's alley. I think being dropped from Ad Sense added (no pun intended) some side effects. Ad Sense is a pretty slick platform that lets you pick size and shape of ads.

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

Only answer if you feel like it, but let me get this straight:

If google thinks you are not a fine, upstanding website, to their standards, they then allow Adsense to bombard readers of the website…because?

It's even more confusing than that... Google's policy is to simply cease showing ads on specific pages that it feels violate its policies, however ads have continued to show with zero monetization for almost 2 months now.

Yesterday's ad barrage was likely due to me desperately tying to get things flowing again. I think I've restored normalcy, and while ads are flowing for unregistered users only, Google is still withholding payment. I have contacted them and asked for an account review, but I'm not holding my breath.

 

[SeaKingTacco]

Ah.

So, more like big corporation is going to act like a big corporation…

Let us know if you need money thrown into the kitty, Mike.

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

Thanks, I would really like that big corporation to pay for showing ads to unregistered visitors (probably 90% spambots lol), and I'm not giving up on that dream yet.

 

[Halifax Tar]

Thanks for all your work Mike!

 

[OldSolduer]

It’s working wonderfully!! Thank you!!

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

Good morning folks,

TL;DR: Let me know if you have issues with emails from Army.ca.

Just a quick note to say that I have made some pretty deep changes to emails sent by Army.ca to counter email spam. (Unfortunately no effect on spambot visitors to the forums itself.) I've added DKIM and DMARC. DKIM means that all outbound emails are now signed to prove they come from my server. DMARC sets a policy that if if emails from @army.ca are unsigned, the receiving server is to reject them. That will eliminate anyone trying to spoof and use army.ca addresses as they can't add a valid digital signature.

Email providers like ICloud and Yahoo increasingly require these policies to be in place, and are starting to reject emails without them. We should be all for uninterrupted email service.

If you suddenly stop hearing from me, you know I did it all wrong.

Cheers
Mike

 

[Bruce Monkhouse]

Mike, I was deleting spam around 05:00 this morning and did notice some lag time, don't know if that is related.

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

Probably not, but having said that, the compute cost for sending every single email has just gone up, as we have to cryptographically sign the contents now. Won't help with server load I'm afraid, but keeps us in the game for being able to send email.

 

[SeaKingTacco]

Probably not, but having said that, the compute cost for sending every single email has just gone up, as we have to cryptographically sign the contents now. Won't help with server load I'm afraid, but keeps us in the game for being able to send email.

Let us know if you need money dropped into the kitty for server upgrades!

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

Much appreciated, let's see how things go! I also did some cleanup of old stuff so maybe will compensate for the extra load. Time will tell!