IMPORTANT: E-MAIL ADDRESS CHANGE
Cidu Bill on Aug 5th 2008
Spam has pretty much made the e-mail address I’ve used for the past four years useless, so all submissions to the CIDU Page should now be sent to comicsidontunderstand………………at……………………gmail.com.
A couple of other notes that I’ll be adding to the FAQ along with the e-mail change:
If you send a comment that uses the word “suck” in any context, it will be sent to my moderation queue rather than immediately appearing on the page. This filter was necessary because of the vast amount of sexually-based spam that includes the word.
Yes, once again spam is inconveniencing everybody. It sucks, I know.
I’ve been getting a lot of requests lately to “exchange links.” For the record, I’ve never done that. If anybody wants to link to the CIDU Page (and many people do), thank you. If there’s a site I think I should recommend to you guys, I’ll link to it. But I don’t play quid pro quo.
This won’t be going on the FAQ, but… You might notice that the Google Adsense ads are gone. Good old Google, screwed me again (”suck” is filtered; “screw” isn’t. Go figure). Some years back, they sent me an e-mail telling me there were some irregularities in my ads and they were canceling my account and keeping the money they owed me up until then. They refused to offer any explanation, let alone documentation, because their methods of determining this sort of thing were “proprietary.”
Okay, fine. But then they canceled my son’s account as well (keeping the money they owed him) because it was “associated with” an account that was closed. This was a different account, opened at a different time, for a different site, under a different Social Security number, at a different mailing address in a different town. The only thing connecting us was the same uncommon surname and the same state (and I’m not sure what they’d have done if we’d lived in Pennsylvania, which happens to be lousy with Bickels). Again, they let us both know they didn’t need to explain.
More galling is that my site had a great many Google links, and it was impossible to find and delete all of them. If anybody clicked one of them, they received a message saying something along the lines of “this link is no longer valid because the webmaster is in violation of our rules: cheater, cheater, pumpkin eater.” Libel, anybody?
For some idiot reason, I decided to start up another Adsense account last year. Today I received an e-mail from Google telling me that “to eliminate fraud,” they were checking the phone numbers of record of all account holders and unless I gave them mine so that they could call me and have me confirm my identity, they would close my account. And keep the money they owed me.
That’s right, I’m going to give my new unlisted phone number to an organization that mines and compiles information and has demonstrated the belief that nether privacy laws nor copyright law apply to them. So they’re closing the account and keeping the mney they owe me.
There’s an old saying online — I know it’s in New Jersey, probably online — that says, fool me once …
I am truly amazed that some people actually earn money by running websites (and I’m thankful that I never really tried to): While I’m not certain that any other organization is as outwardly crooked as Google, I’ve yet to come across one that doesn’t cheat website authors at least to some extent.
Filed in Bill Bickel, CIDU, Google, spam | 15 responses so far
Steven Hunter Aug 5th 2008 at 11:28 pm 1
Have you considered Project Wonderful for ads? They only do picture ads (IIRC) in case that matters.
http://www.projectwonderful.com/
Steven Hunter Aug 5th 2008 at 11:30 pm 2
Oops, I was wrong. They do text ads too.
Cidu Bill Aug 6th 2008 at 12:42 am 3
Steven, I think I checked out PW a while back and discovered they weren’t compatible with WordPress (or not compatible with WordPress unless I did a bunch of technical stuff I had no idea how to do and had no real interest in learning).
Thanks, though.
Powers Aug 6th 2008 at 07:36 am 4
Isn’t Google’s motto “Do no evil”?
Winter Wallaby Aug 6th 2008 at 12:17 pm 5
That’s their “unofficial” motto. So I suppose they can be officially evil?
I noticed a while ago that if you google “Comics I Don’t Understand,” you don’t get this page (although you do get earlier incarnation of this page), and that this page has a PageRank of 0. Presumably their algorithms have determined that Bill is using “illicit” web optimization methods.
Winter Wallaby Aug 6th 2008 at 12:22 pm 6
Lest anyone misunderstand my previous comment, I meant “mistakenly determined.” Someone I have trouble imagining Bill spending a lot of time trying to illicitly pump up his search engine rank.
Cidu Bill Aug 6th 2008 at 12:31 pm 7
As if I’d have the first idea how!
You’re right, though, the current CIDU page is almost invisible on Google. I wonder whether this is because they don’t update their database very well (a search for my name pulls up the About.com site that somebody else has been running since June of 2004), or they’re still waging their jihad against me.
alley cat Aug 6th 2008 at 01:33 pm 8
Wow, that’s a creepy and unnerving story. Thanks for sharing it so we have an idea of what goes on out there. Google sounds like a police state.
Winter Wallaby Aug 6th 2008 at 01:57 pm 9
The latter, Bill. They have web crawlers continually updating their records. I just checked, and they list your page as a having a PageRank (a gauge of interest level for searches) of 0 (on a scale of 0 to 10), which means that it will always be the least relevant choice for any search. I think that no page is ever so uninteresting (and certainly not this one, since it has multiple incoming links) that it receives a PageRank of 0, and that the low ranking is only used as a punishment.
Dan V Aug 6th 2008 at 02:57 pm 10
So, my question is…
why is your new CIDU address a gmail account?
Trying to curry favor with the evil empire?
Subversively infiltrating their ranks?
Fan mail from some flounder?
– dan
Cidu Bill Aug 6th 2008 at 03:02 pm 11
I’m using a G-mail account because I can set it up to automatically forward to my “real” e-mail address. I’d only be spiting myself if I refused to make use of what Google has to offer.
Hell, they OWE ME.
mJohnHurt Aug 6th 2008 at 03:27 pm 12
Have you ever looked at Project Wonderful? It’s an auction based ad system that was written by (I think) the guy who writes Dinosaur Comics. It has a large penetration w/ webscomics artists meaning you might be their perfect audience (they might actually pull in some new readers instead of just stealing each other’s)
Powers Aug 7th 2008 at 06:59 am 13
Did you read the first comment, John?
mJohnHurt Aug 8th 2008 at 04:52 pm 14
Clearly, Powers, I did not. But thanks for asking =)
Cidu Bill Aug 8th 2008 at 05:31 pm 15
Apparently Project Wonderful does play nice with WordPress after all, so I’m giving it a shot. Thanks to everybody who suggested it.