Google sent me an email the other day telling me that my site had “inappropriate” content:
As stated in our program policies, AdSense publishers are not permitted to place Google ads on pages with adult or mature content.
Adult? Mature? On *my* site? Hmmm, this required some further investigation. It didn’t take long to find the problem- Google even gave me a sample URL. Apparently, sometime in the last few weeks some comment spammer bot found my photo gallery and started spewing link-farm comments in random spots throughout. And of course, the only person who has to do more work in this process is me.
Fortunately, there was an easy fix: delete the comments. All 900 of them… with Gallery software that amazingly only allows me to delete one comment at a time. Thank goodness for my SQL skills. But wait, new comments are coming in, almost as fast as I can delete them. I had more than one hundred new ones between 4:30 and 5:30 PM today. Okay, so find some way to moderate the comments, maybe even pre-filter them. Of course, that requires an upgrade to my Gallery software, and then that upgrade broke other things in my site, and that meant several more hours of fiddling around.
The end result is that I know have comment moderation and an Akismet spam filter on my gallery. And somewhere, some Russian/Chinese/Texan spam meister is muttering under their breath as they remove my site from their list of 28,000,000 sites they pump their garbage into. Yeah, I can dream…