It would appear that Google can’t tell the difference between actual depictions of real violence and hand-illustrated / Photoshop-fabricated haunted house marketing imagery:

This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.
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Hello,

During a recent review of your account we found that you are currently displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our program policies
(https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=48182&stc=aspe-1pp-en).

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EXAMPLE PAGE: http://rgvscreams.com/schedule.shtml

Please note that this URL is an example and that the same violations may exist on other pages of this website or other sites in your network.

VIOLATION(S) FOUND:

VIOLENCE/GORE: As stated in our program policies, AdSense publishers are not permitted to place Google ads on pages with violent or disturbing content, including sites with gory text or images.  More information about this policy can be found in our help center (https://www.google.com/adsense/support/as/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=105954).

VIOLENCE: As stated in our program policies, AdSense publishers are not permitted to place Google ads on pages with violent content. This includes sites with content related to breaking bones, getting hit by trains or cars, or people receiving serious injuries.  More information about this policy can be found in our help center (https://www.google.com/adsense/support/as/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=105954).

ACTION TAKEN: We have disabled ad serving to your site.

ACCOUNT STATUS: ACTIVE
Your AdSense account remains active. However, please note that our team reserves the right to disable your account at any time. As such, we encourage you to become familiar with our program policies and monitor your network accordingly.
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Thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team
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For more information regarding this email, please visit our Help Center: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=1342779&stc=aspe-ai4-en.

What cooperation? It’s not like I was given (a) a choice or (b) a means to argue about it.

Gothic.net sought out my thoughts on a variety of topics as we launched 2011. As somebody who designed Gothic.net’s look at the turn of the last century, I find this immensely rewarding.

READ ON

PREFACE: I’ve been dealing with web hosting and hosting providers for over 10 years, both for myself and for companies for whom I’ve worked. I’m not a newbie. I’m not an idiot. I don’t have unreasonable expectations with regard to web hosting. So, that said…

I’ve had a hosting account with GoDaddy.com (2, actually) for a couple of years now, one of which is for my personal websites. For the past year, I’ve noticed consistent/persistent problems with any site on that particular account that has a database involved – WordPress, Drupal, stuff like that. Sometimes the sites just run slower, but far too often, they either don’t load at all, or don’t load correctly. Numerous calls (10+) to GoDaddy tech support have yielded mixed results; sometimes the support person would make some effort to ferret out the problem, but typically, the response has been effectively “Well, we can’t reproduce the problem you’re describing right at this moment, so it must be something you’re doing wrong.” Regardless, the issue has persisted, and nobody on GoDaddy’s end has ever followed through to identify the problem and actually fix it.

Yesterday my art site ChadSavage.com wasn’t loading. After an hour of waiting to see if it would self-correct, I called GoDaddy support. The response was basically “I’ve run a bunch of tests, and everything checks out. I can’t find any problems. Maybe another site on your shared server is hogging the resources. Have a nice day.” Bear in mind that while the guy was telling me this, I was sitting here watching the site either not load, or produce errors. So I asked him, point blank, what my options were, and I got the response that I’ve been getting from GoDaddy when they don’t want to actually identify and fix the issue: It’s something specific to my site(s), and I need to clear caches, run diagnostics, blah blah blah. In other words, I’m the problem, not GoDaddy’s hosting.

The guy just stopped giving a shit, and I could actually hear the moment it happened, and there we were: My website wasn’t working, and GoDaddy’s response was “Too bad for you”.

So I signed up for an account with Dreamhost.com and moved ChadSavage.com there, where it’s been humming along without a hitch since about midnight last night. If it was something specific to the website, it wouldn’t work on *any* server, so sell me another one, GoDaddy.

Here’s where it gets entertaining, thanks to Twitter. After the phone call, I posted my displeasure at http://twitter.com/sinistervisions. Following is the “conversation” that has ensued since last night:

(ME) GoDaddy.com – when I call to report serious hosting issues, telling me you can’t recreate the issue and dismissing me? Not cool.

(GoDaddy) @SinisterVisions Sorry to hear your experience w/Support didn’t meet your expectations. Please DM us some info would like to learn more.

(ME) @godaddy My experience w/support “didn’t meet my expectations”? I was summarily dismissed by support, problem unresolved. Way to understate.

(GoDaddy) @SinisterVisions If you’d like us to research your hosting concern, please DM some details to help us understand.

(ME) @godaddy The time to “research my hosting concern” was when I called support for the umpteenth time, not after the fact on freakin’ Twitter.

While I appreciate the need to try to do damage control to defend one’s brand on social networks like Twitter, inviting me to send info via Twitter DM (Direct Message) is not only lazy, it’s vaguely insulting. Direct Messages on Twitter are limited to 140 characters per missive – not exactly conducive to sharing details of any kind. Further, if GoDaddy really cared (as opposed to making a half-assed attempt to look like they care), whoever runs that account would’ve made an attempt to actually contact me as a human being and customer. More to the point, somebody on any one of the multiple phone calls from the last year would have shown an ounce of initiative and resolved the actual problem the second or third time I reported it (or ninth, or tenth…).

The lesson? Yes, absolutely use Twitter to monitor what people are saying about your brand or company, but no response at all is better than an insincere one.

ADDENDUM: After I posted the above -

(GoDaddy) @SinisterVisions Sorry for the confusion. Since you wrote to us on Twitter, I thought you’d wanted our help. Let me know if that changes.

(ME) @GoDaddy I didn’t “write to you on Twitter.” I used Twitter to criticize the lack of service I got when I called GoDaddy support.

Again – SO missing the point. I did want help, which is why I called repeatedly over the course of a year. By the time I posted about it on Twitter, I was done seeking assistance from GoDaddy, a point which their Twitter Account Person seems unable to grasp, still.

2 months (almost exactly) after buying a new Dell desktop computer, it wouldn’t launch. Couldn’t get it to do anything, at all. Got in touch (via chat) with Dell Support. He had me disconnect all peripherals and reboot, which worked, thank god. I told him I’d run standard maintenance tools immediately and asked if there were any diagnostics I could run to identify the cause of the problem. The response:

“I would recommend if the system is working fine then there is no need to do any trouble shooting but if in case it dose not work you need to perform System Restore, but that will wipe all information from your system.”

So this support rep’s solution, if there were ANY FURTHER PROBLEMS: Wipe the machine and start from factory defaults.

For the uninitiated: Imagine if your car didn’t start. You call a mechanic and say “My car won’t start”. The mechanic says “Check the battery connectors and try to start it again”. You do, and it works. You ask the mechanic “Is there anything I can do to make sure this doesn’t happen again?” The mechanic says “Replace the entire engine.”

Yes. That’s a bit extreme. There are various things that you can do to insure your car works correctly/better. Same with the computer, but this guy, apparently, didn’t want to bother talking to me about them.

Thanks, Dell. Can’t wait to see what your support reps tell me when there’s a serious problem. “Go buy a new computer. Might we suggest a Dell?”

*Addendum: Yes, the tech support guy helped me fix my computer, and I appreciate that. But (a) his solution was a stock response that, frankly, I should have remembered to try myself, (b) he actually suggested that I take no further action to investigate why my computer wouldn’t start, and (c) if it hadn’t worked, he would’ve had me go to an unnecessary extreme right away. Hence the bitching above.

1. Not everybody uses Facebook in the same way or for the same reasons that you do. You don’t have to understand why I don’t want to join that thing you want me to join – just accept that I don’t and that I probably have my reasons.

2. Not everybody feels strongly about the things you feel strongly about. That’s not a failing on somebody else’s part – that’s life. On Facebook, take “no” for an answer.

3. You sent me an invitation to something and I didn’t do what you wanted me to do? That’s because I CHOSE NOT TO. It is NOT because I missed the invitation, hit the wrong button, didn’t understand what you were asking or other flaw or mistake on my part. Sending another invitation translates to “Please remove me from your Friends List, since I’m obviously not going to take the hint.”

4. Saying “No” to your requests does not make me a bad person. It just means I’m not your dancing monkey. See above.

5. If you really feel that strongly about something, CALL ME. If you don’t have my phone number or don’t know me that well, you probably shouldn’t be hassling me in the first place.

6. Applications on Facebook that serve no actual purpose (pokes, gifts, virtual farms, virtual crime syndicates) are, in the scheme of things, colossal wastes of time, and when you inflict these things on other people, you are wasting their time as well. If you wouldn’t do it on a phone call, don’t do it on Facebook:

“Hey, Bob! I bought you a drink!”
“Thanks, Fred, but where are you?”
“I’m at home. It’s not a real drink, it’s a pretend drink!”
“…what?”
“I’m pretending I bought you a drink! It’s not real. Now pretend to buy me one!”
“Fred, I gotta walk the dog.”
“But Bob! What about this great non-existent drink I pretended to buy for you?”
*click*

7. Bored? OH MY GOD NOBODY CARES. The only thing more boring than actually being bored is reading that somebody else is bored. Go take out the trash.

8. Be honest: How many people do you *really* believe are interested in your video game “achievements”? Yeah? WRONG. The answer is “not a single person“.

9. You’re a big fan of hippopotamuses that tango? Awesome. Dancing hippopotamuses have a Fan Page? Great! But you DO NOT NEED to send an invitation to everybody on your Friends List to Become a Fan. We fans of tangoing hippopotamuses will find that Fan Page on our own, don’t you worry.

10. Take a critical look at your status updates on the whole once in a while. If all they consist of is bitching about your life, TAKE THE HINT YOU’RE GIVING YOURSELF and do something about your life, or at least stop bitching about it so much. Whining about something on Facebook doesn’t change anything – CHANGING THINGS changes things.