If you think about it, Google has mostly only used other protocols for communication in the past, now it’s creating it’s own. They clearly want to create a completely new protocol that will effectively be the future of these old primitive protocols.

For this to catch on, it will either have to run directly along side smtp and xmmp or layer on top of them.

We’re going to need a way to pass requests over http to smtp or pop3/imap, and what better way to do it than with gmail?

Sure, but there’s no API…

It’s argued that all you need to do is roll your own “api” or library class to use smtp and imap server provided by Google Mail (gmail) to send and receive emails.

The problem with this is that you’re forced to hand the app your username and password. Naturally this raises security concerns.

Of course this isn’t a big problem if you only use your own username and password and manage to store it on your server security.

The problem comes when others want to use their gmail accounts with your web app. They have not choice but to hand over their username and password. What can possibly go wrong?

• Their username and password gives you FULL access to their account, including account actions such as changing passwords.

My proposal would be for an API that allowed you to interface with gmail, in particular to send emails (which has the biggest scope here).

To access the API you could generate an API Key from within gmail that would allow you to interface with gmail, but limited to mailing functions, rather than account settings.

An alternative to this is similar to the “GoogleCode.com Password”, used by project members when checking out or committing source code changes, or when using command-line tools to upload files to the project “Downloads” tab.

If you could set a “Google Mail SMTP Password” or similar, which would only permit you to access the gmail SMTP server, but not gmail itself, this would also allow you to overcome the security issues mentioned above.

However, this alternative wouldn’t help towards integration with Google Wave as much as an api would.

In summary, to resolve the security issue an API is an option, but for Google Wave integration too, it’s essentially a must.

I hope someone at Google reads this and agrees with me, for that matter, I hope you or anyone reading this agrees with me.

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Today I discovered that mydigitallife.info had clearly taken details from my batch file code and used it without giving me or fixr.co.uk any credit at all.

Just compare the actual functions in my removeoga.bat to their RemoveOGA.bat, you can clearly see it’s the same, yet no credit is given at all.

mydigitallife.info is LAME.

- HM2K

Taking someone else’s code and not giving any credit for it is LAME, yes mydigitallife.info is lame and I will be boycotting your site until further notice.

@ECHO off
TITLE mydigitallife.info Boycott
ECHO mydigitallife.info Boycott because they stole my code without giving me credit.
ECHO.
ECHO This will bind mydigitallife.info and www.mydigitallife.info to 0.0.0.0
PAUSE
ECHO 0.0.0.0 www.mydigitallife.info >> %systemdrive%\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
ECHO 0.0.0.0 mydigitallife.info >> %systemdrive%\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Simply copy this into a notepad window, and save as “mydigitallife_boycott.bat”, then run it.

Anyway, I’ve since improved my batch file to support more versions and languages, so if you copy that too, I’ll be on to you!

Thanks.

Note: If you were to clearly give me and fixr.co.uk credit, I may remove this post.

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The idea was to start a dating website. Although a fairly saturated market place, I figured it’d be another one to add to my profile.

Earlier on in the year I remember coming across an article on the .net magazine website, entitled “Creating your own dating site” (part2, part3).

In the article Karl Hodge explains how PHPizabi is the ideal social networking site engine with messaging and chat features.

One of the most interesting statements very early on in this article is this:

PHPizabi is a refreshingly professional, 100 per cent open source, social networking and dating application.

But we’ll come back to this later.

We begin with the preparation steps, where we see a screenshot of the author’s attempt: “dogmeet.net” – it looks pretty neat.

Sure i’m a pretty advanced user, so I’ll skip this and jump directly to the comments to see what’s been said.

just google phpizabi and you get www.phpizabi.net – it’s open source which means you can download it all from the interweb.

Thanks Sam, this should get me started.

Visiting the site, I’m greeted with quite a pretty looking site, however the last entry in their news is a vulnerability report from back in August 2008, I figured this would be fixed by now and proceeded to download regardless.

The file I got given was “PHPizabi_0.848b_C1_HFP1.zip“.

I skip to step 2: Installation.

I quickly notice that the installation I’m using is nothing like the (better looking) screenshots in the tutorial, but I thought “never mind it must be a newer version”.

Upon completion of the fairly straightforward installation I get straight to work.

First thing I look at is the themes. There is only one provided and it looks nothing like the (better looking) one seen on the article. Strange, I thought, perhaps they are using a different package.

From here I proceeded to to investigate what other themes I can get for free. I soon found out that “not many” was the answer, although I did find a link entitled “PhpIzabi Mods, 24 mods & themes:FREE DOWNLOAD“. I figured it may be worth a look at.

Pretty wrong. The themes were no better coded than the shipped one. Poor markup, poor use of CSS, and just generally not very good looking.

This would take some time to cleanup. I started anyway.

I cleaned up the “frame.tpl” making it all XHTML, removed the table layout, and added new styles to handle it. I also cleaned up “home.tpl” and a few more of the tpl files.

I eventually started getting somewhere, so decided to browse around the site I had started to form. Some of the pages simply didn’t look right, and wouldn’t populate correctly. I decided to look at the code.

In a way, I wish I never had. In the “index.php” I noticed a lot of poor coding, stuff that I’d not seen since about 2005, makes sense since the copyright says 2005, and last modification date was September 3rd 2006.

This isn’t very reassuring, this would need a LOT of work to bring it up to speed for 2008. Perhaps I downloaded the wrong version? There must be a more up to date version or a simply better version?

It was at this point that I decided to read the included documentation starting with the “UPDATE_README.TXT”. Here I find this:

To perform an update from PHPizabi 0.4XX, please visit the PIO website to download
the latest migration tool – http://online.phpizabi.net

Interesting. 0.4XX must have been a fairly popular version for them to create a migration tool for and I also found that the “phpizabi online” contained lots of mods and themes.

However, looking at the “core” releases I found that the latest release was “Mar. 5th 2007″. This is not good for any project.

What the hell is going on here? Time to do some research.

I came across the PHPizabi demo site, which looks similar to the version I have (apart from the mention of Alicia), only it has broken pages too (see Inkspot). I’m convinced I have the wrong version now.

This is when I discover phpizabi.com, and their about section:

PHPizabi was founded in mid 2005 by Jeff Knipp whom hired Claude Desjardens to code a personal website. A short time later Claude and Jeff agreed to become 50/50 partners and the personal project became what was destined to be known as PHPizabi.

In August 2005 the first release of PHPizabi was made available to the general public to download free of charge. PHPizabi has gained international fame through various publications as one of the best free community software on the market and has a broad following of users.

In November 2006, Jeff was illegally removed from the PHPizabi project by Claude Desjardens. Though legal remedy has not been ruled out, the best interest of the community was taken into consideration and thus the creation of this site which was created to offer the community an alternative to the non-community oriented support provided by the PHPizabi.net site.

Where the net site surrounds themselves around those only wishing to make a buck or two by allowing people to sell 1 line code mods for ridiculous prices, we believe in the open source community spirit. While we do have the Mod Club, we have many mods that are free, and as always support is 100% free.

Turns out there’s legal issues surrounding this project. This is no good.

I decided to return the original article and try and figure out where it all went so wrong.

On the first page, I find the following statements which I had clearly missed:

Find the file PHPizabi_0.415b_R3.zip on this issue’s CD and drag it over to your hard drive

return to the CD and find the file 0415bR3_sphfixHFP.zip

As it seems, they ARE using a different version, it appears to be the earlier 0.4XX version mentioned in the upgrade text in the newer version. I found this:

PHPizabi 0.415b R4 6.03Mb      11/23/2005      No support      Encrypted (IonCube)

Low and behold here we have the version mentioned in the article, released back in 2005, however it has IonCube Encryption on the core files. Odd because I remember the article saying that it was 100% open source. Guess not.

Further research via google news finds me an article describing a known vulnerability in PHPizabi. I also discovered that there is still no fix, dubbing PHPizabi as the most hackable Dating Script on the Internet. There’s no end to security issues in PHPizabi.

It seems I’m not alone, others have also had bad experiences with PHPizabi and apparently support sucks even when you pay.

So what now? I CANNOT use this, it’s unprofessional, barely usable, unmaintainable, poorly coded and worst of all vulnerable to exploitation. This project is dead.

So with the help of my earlier research, and wikipedia, I found some alternatives:

• OSDate
• Boonex Dolphin
• DZOIC
• SocialEngine
• phpFox
• AroundMe
• PeopleAggregator
• ELGG
• Mugshot
• Drupal
• Community Server
• Joomla!
• ODS

Also checkout this social networking solution comparison table at techcrunch.

What did you decide to go with and why?

Hopefully a “refreshingly professional, 100 per cent open source, social networking and dating application”, but I don’t hold high hopes.

UPDATE: I decided to share my article with the PHPizabi.com forum, however I guess they didn’t agree with me as I’m banned. The reply post notification via email from blackbook says: “yea ya like giving links to my paid mods for free..your banned dude”, thanks, as good as an excuse as any I guess, but it begs the question: now who’s “wishing to make a buck or two”? Besides, let’s face it, if nobody is going to want to use PHPizabi, who’s going to want to use the mods anyway?

UPDATE2: I’m looking at writing a dating site solution using CakePHP as the framework, based on Matt Inman’s Mingle2. I sympathise with his decision to write his own solution. Wish me luck!

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Build complete.
Don’t forget to run ‘make test’.

amber# make test
make: don’t know how to make test. Stop

It made me laugh anyway.

No related posts.

• YouTube Video @ 0:51:15
• Slideshow presentation (part2) @ slide 61-64

This is because Django has only just released version 1.0 (on 03/09/08). Considering that the project was started over 3 years ago (July 2005), it’s a fairly long time.

In his insightful, yet comic presentation Cal pokes fun at Djangos low version number, suggesting that projects with a higher version number can be more trusted, while giving an an alternate (and extreme) suggestion of 10,000 (or even vista), claiming that these are “serious business”.

Another project accused of “only just releasing version 1.0″ is wine. After 15 years wine was finally “uncorked“. However, wine previously had a date versioning scheme (eg: Wine 20040505).

Although there is no right or wrong way of doing software versioning, the advice in the open source world is to “release soon, release often” – high version numbers are expected, especially for more mature projects.

In conclusion, we can learn not to be afraid of releasing with bigger version numbers, especially since it saves time continually trying to convincing people that “despite the low version number it is stable“.

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As I had known him for a long time, I felt obliged to help out, plus I was now interested in the questions that would be asked.

Based on what had been said I knew they were going to be questions on defining what a hacker is and what a hacker does, something i’ve been interested in defining for quite some time.

Here’s what I said…

What would you say a hacker was in your eyes?

It’s said that a hacker is not defined by the hacker but by others. You soon come to realise the extent of this when the media use this term in an article about you.

How I see it is the term is used based on a level of understanding. For your average Joe, who knows very little about computers outside of your basic office package may view someone who does, as a hacker.

However, it’s likely that these more knowledgeable people do not view themselves as a hacker, and also have formed their own opinion of what a hacker is or more importantly, what a hacker isn’t.

Do you know about the history of Hackers?

Traditionally a “hacker” was defined as a programmer who “hacked” up bits of code. It’s since been defined in many different ways.

Ever since the first network was constructed, there has always been hackers. If you build a system people will inevitably mess with it.

What type of things do they do?

These days hackers are most notorious for breaching the security of a system. However, hackers come in different forms and colours.

Have you ever heard of the hacker ethic?

Well, you have your white hat hackers, commonly known as “security experts” and are often employed by companies to test the security of systems if not, to prove a point or as a proof of concept. Ultimately their skills are used for good purposes, sort of hackers with morals if you like.

On the other hand you have your black hat hackers who use their skills for various “bad” purposes, whether it be for illegal activities, or purely malicious.

You also have your grey hat hackers, a cross between the two. They generally do bad things, such as breach system security, to achieve things that are in their mind, are morally “not bad” or sometimes even good. Usually for personal gain.

So do you think a modder different from a hacker?

In my opinion, and in the context of software engineering a hacker is someone who essentially makes the application do something it wouldn’t normally do, which is effectively exactly what a modder is.

If you look at some of the most commonly used software applications used at the very core of the internet including Apache HTTPD and BIND, you’ll soon find out that they are made up from many of hacks and workarounds.

However, this type of hacker would be a software hacker, a distant relative of the security expert.

So how did you get started and involved in it?

I have always been interested in computers, but I have also always been interested in how things work.

When I was young I didn’t understand enough about the “hacking” to actually be involved with it. I did however learn a little about phreaking and then software cracking.

I found it very interesting that with the changes of a few bytes in an executable file you could turn a piece of software from trial to registered. To achieve this you must understand the basics of reverse engineering software. Often a painstakingly slow process, with little reward at the end.

Eventually through increasing use of the internet, I began to learn about web servers, mail servers, rfcs, dns, irc and all sorts of scripting languages including perl and php.

It wasn’t long before I begin hacking around with these platforms and protocols.

How did you learn?

I’m very much a hands on learner. I learn by example, and trial and error, not by reading a book.

Having said that, I have read books on all sorts of computer related topics, but I find them more useful as a resource than a method of learning.

It’s taken me quite some time to fully understand some aspects of the way the things work, especially online. I think learning the basics of how computers and the internet works is a very important part of education.

It concerns me that the kids of today, although they know how to use computers and the internet, do not understand how it works.

What do you make of the new generation of hackers?

I don’t think there is a new generation of hackers. What I see are the same old spammers, but all new developers.

Hacking has evolved.

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Geek in the Park is a day-long event for geeks (mainly web developers) to have a get together.

The event is going to be held in Jephson Gardens, Leamington Spa, Warwickshire.

The Picnic during the day, followed by The Discussion in the evening. The event starts on Saturday at noon and everything should wrap up by around 11pm.

…and yes, I will be attending.

So, come see me at Geek in the Park on Saturday 9th August 2008. Put it in your diary!

I aim to get there around mid-day, but have been known to be fashionably late.

You’ll find me listed on both the Upcoming and Facebook event pages.

Don’t forget to visit the Geek in the Park website and add your email address to the announcements.

For those of you on IRC, you can visit #webdev @ EFnet to discuss it further.

See you there!

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They then proceeded to ask me “what do we rank for on google?”, my response was “your company name, unless you request otherwise”.

They then went on to mentioned that “the man from BT” can get us listed “at the top” of the search engine for “our keywords”.

Naturally I reply to this with a sigh, but how they can they go around making such statements? It’s so unethical to make these kind of claims.

After reading their marketing bumph, I found out what they meant by “at the top”. What they are offering is the ability to list as the “sponsored links” in search engines, which appear “at the top”.

They requested my email address to send me “further details” through, below is the marketing email I was sent. I couldn’t wait to pull it apart.

This isn’t at all a review of the BT Web Clicks service, in fact i’ve not used it, it’s simply an analysis of their marketing blurb.

BT webclicks is a new service that guarantees as many or as little hits on your website based on your particular need.
Example. Anybody searching search engines such as google yahoo and msn for the specific type of business they need will be presented with a choice of various differenet company’s. What we guarantee is not just a priority sponsored listing. We absolutely guarantee that we will the will actually click on to your website searching for whatever your key words say about you. Ie car hire chaueffeur driven

WRONG: You can’t guarantee anything you have no control over. You have no control over our websites or any of the search engines. No matter whether you think you do or not, even if you are using deep packet inspection for targeted advertising, which is against your privacy policy and thus against the law.

If we don’t achieve the level of clicks you want we will give you your money back for the percentage we don’t achieve. Furthermore we are that confident of our product that we will allow customers to trial the 960 package for 3 months and can terminate the agreement if they are not happy at the end of this period.

EXPENSIVE: According to the BT Web Clicks Prices, you’re charging between £1 and £15 per month per click. So, 100 clicks in a month could cost you £1,500. Why would I do that when I get get 100 clicks a month for free using organic methods?

BT Web Clicks – Search Engine Marketing for Small Businesses Running a small business is hard work, fortunately your Internet Advertising doesn’t have to be Do you run a small business in your spare time or know someone who does? If so, BT is launching a new service which could help you save time and money.

WASTE: of time and money more like. Small businesses are vulnerable, but they’re right, running a business doesn’t get any easier, just like huge corporations are going to continue to try and trick you trick you into buying something you don’t need. If your business is important, spend the time and money doing it yourself, rather than paying BT to do it.

Internet Advertising is the fastest growing advertising media in the UK, fuelled by the tremendous growth in the use of the Internet. But small and medium sized businesses are missing out on much of this usage because advertising on search engines is complicated and time consuming.

NOT ALWAYS BEST: Just because it’s the fastest doesn’t always mean it’s the best, this is because it’s very competitive, and just about everyone has some involvement these days. This is why Google have now started using other forms of media including TV, audio and print. Whatever gets results.

BT Web Clicks is a new Internet Advertising product that helps small and medium businesses by taking away the pain of advertising on search engines, leaving them to concentrate on their business. It offers customers a fixed amount of leads to their website for a fixed monthly fee. It is backed by a guarantee1 that offers them money back for undelivered clicks.

PAINKILLER: Yes, using BT Web Clicks is much like using a pain killer, it block the pain, but they don’t actually give you a solution, and just like pain killers, they wear off after a while, unless you keep paying for them. Instead invest in a consultant who can act on your behalf.

Setting up a search marketing campaign on the major UK search engines can take up to 30 hours, however, customers placing orders for BT Web Clicks will have our expert team identify the keywords relevant to their business, create the advertising text, and place and manage the adverts on the major search engines including Google, Yahoo and at least 12 other search engines.

HOW LONG?: Last time I checked, planning and setting up a search engine marketing campaign should take about 30 minutes, not 30 hours. If choosing relevant keywords, creating advertising text and signing up to Google Adwords takes 30 hours, you must be stupid.

BT Web Clicks
Get more customers to visit your business website!

# Sponsored links on multiple search engines
# Experts choosing optimised keywords
# Fixed prices to suit your budget

FREE: None of this actually costs money, just your time. How much is your time actually worth? If it’s worth more than BT are charging for this service, I recommend you hire someone else to read through this for you.

BT Web Clicks is a search marketing service for your website or online shop. This service creates your business’ very own sponsored links on both major and local search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, in order to drive relevant leads through to your site through carefully chosen keywords.

FREE AGAIN: Creating your very own sponsored links is a FREE service offered by search engines. You only have to pay for them to appear on search engines for the keywords you choose.

Who will benefit from BT Web Clicks?
Your website is the first step in getting your business online, but how are people looking for your type of products and services going to find you if they don’t know you exist?

MARKETING: There’s lots of ways people can find out you exist. You shouldn’t rely on paid online marketing exclusively, there’s plenty of free methods and other medias to explore.

What is BT Web Clicks?

Many people start researching through search engines for both local and national suppliers – so whether you’re a local business such as a florist, takeaway restaurant, or hairdresser looking for local customers, or a specialist mail order company selling nationally BT Web Clicks can help.

WHAT?: People do what? I don’t think they do, they use yellow pages for local information. Don’t let them trick you.

What do I get?

# Keyword generation – our team of experts analyse search engines and choose the keywords that are going to generate you relevant leads to your site.
# Advertising text – we use professional online copywriters to create a text ad for your website to attract customers.
# No admin – our automated systems connect directly with the search engines to bid on keywords and upload your sponsored links.
# Fixed budget – you choose the budget so you know exactly what you will spend each month, all backed by a guarantee.
# Leads direct to your door – when a customer clicks your sponsored link they go straight through to your website and not through any other online directory.
# A monthly report with number of click through to your website – you can monitor your traffic and increase package if necessary

GUARANTEED PIECE OF CRAP: Here’s how I see it. A guy puts a guarantee on the box ’cause he wants you to fell all warm and toasty inside. But they know all they sold ya was a guaranteed piece of shit. That’s all it is. Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time.

What does this mean for my business?
Getting visitors to your website is the first step in getting a paying customer so promoting your site in the right place is vitally important. Search marketing is a proven way of generating leads directly from both major and local search engines, however getting it right and running a search marketing campaign to generate quality leads can be both time consuming and costly.

With BT Web Clicks you get the opportunity to use expertly chosen keywords and professionally written advertising copy that are all relevant to your business. This helps ensure that the visitors that come to your website using a sponsored link are looking for the products or services that your business supplies, and more likely to become your customer.

THE REAL EXPERT: They aren’t the real expect, YOU ARE, yes, that’s right, the real expert is YOU! After all, it’s your business, you know your customers better than anyone else, right?

If you need anymore information don’t hesitate to call Yours sincereley, Mark Clark Sales Executive: Cheshire and North Wales BT Directories
Email: mark.d.clark@bt.com
Mobile: 07918717465

THANKS: Thanks Mark, you’ve been most helpful. I enjoyed writing about this. Now watch as I rank on the first page of google for “BT Web Clicks”.

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It’s content was mainly made up of what I was researching around that time, including a few controversial topics such as hacking, trojans and warez distribution. (Oh the joys of being under 18, or at least I was at time of original creation).

Thus, I got a reasonable response saying:

Hello [name],

Thank you very much for updating your account information. I have reviewed
www.hm2k.org and concluded that it does not comply with our AdSense
policy. Our goal is to be able to extend our service to as many web
publishers as we can. Unfortunately, after reviewing your site, we are
unable to accept it into our AdSense program at this time for the reason
listed below:

-Unacceptable site content

Please check for a separate application disapproval email for detailed
instructions on how to resolve this problem. Please feel free to reply to
this email for reconsideration when you have made the changes.

Thank you for your understanding.

Sincerely,

Trinh
The Google AdSense Team

And I did understand, it was fair enough at the time…

Since then I had completely revamped “hm2k.org” 2 or 3 times, then finally in January 2007 I decided to completely redo my site, using the wordpress blog system, a whole new domain, a new design, all new content, and a new vision. It’s a whole new site.

Let’s now fast forward to over 4 years later since the original application was submitted, to April 2008…

My blog is getting ever more popular and I wish to cash in on this, but how? My first port of call is Google AdSense.

By this point I’d already had a Google AdSense account for quite some time for my business, which is absolutly fine, this time however, it’s personal.

So, I try and login to Google AdSense using my Google Account that i’ve had for quite some time now, and I receive the following message:

An AdSense account was not found under the Google Account associated with xxxxx@hm2k.org. Please check to make sure you are signing in with your approved AdSense login and password. If you’ve forgot your login, click here. If you’re not an AdSense publisher, sign up for an account.

So I try and signup again, using my existing account as per above.

So I click on signup, and go through the steps…

I get to the step entitled: “This is the account information you entered”…

It says “Which best describes you?”

I click: I have an email address and password (Google Account) I already use with Google services like AdWords, Gmail, Orkut, or the personalized home page.

It says: “Would you like to use your existing Google Account for AdSense?”

I click: “I’d like to use my existing Google account for AdSense.”

A login box saying “Use an existing Google Account” comes up, I login…

The page reloads and it gives me an error saying:

A user with the email you specified already exists
Please select a different Google Account login to access this account.

My first issue is the fact that neither of these errors are very descriptive, the second problem is that they are conflicting errors, they don’t agree with each other. I feel like I’m going round in circles and that neither error is telling me what’s really going on…

Not only do I post on the Google AdSense group, I also proceed to contact Google saying that I’m having “login problems”, which is the only way I can describe the problem I’m seeing.

I got no response from the group, but the response I got direct from Google is as follows:

Hello [name],

Thanks for writing in. I’ll be more than happy to help you with your
password issue. Based on your description of the problem, I’ve provided
two options below. If neither of these helps you log into your account,
please feel free to reply and I’ll help you further.

Your login email address is xxxxx@hm2k.org.

If you know your current password and you’d like to change it, please
follow the directions on this page:
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=9915

If you’ve forgotten your existing password, please visit
https://www.google.com/adsense/assistlogin . On this page, you’ll be able
to submit your email address to us. We’ll then automatically send you an
email with a link that will allow you to reset your password.

Additionally, I’m happy to let you know your application complies with our
program policies and has been approved. Please check your email for a
separate application approval message providing instructions on accessing
your account and getting started with AdSense.

Additionally, please be aware that because your application was previously
disapproved, there may be a delay of 48 hours or more before Google ads
begin appearing on your site. We appreciate your patience.

For additional questions, I’d encourage you to visit the AdSense Help
Center ( http://www.google.com/adsense_help ) or the official AdSense blog
( http://adsense.blogspot.com?utm_source=txft ). Alternatively, feel free
to post your question on the AdSense Help Forum (
http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help?utm_source=txft ).

Sincerely,

Kalpana
The Google AdSense Team

Apart from this email being very unhelpful towards my actual problem, it does clearly say that my application was approved. However, I wait 48 hours and receive nothing.

What’s going on with my account? I can’t login, is it active or not? I don’t know! How could I know?

Browsing my old emails and browsing the web I discover I can have my website appealed, and re-reviewed, but only if you’ve been banned for invalid clicks.

Stupidly (perhaps), I fill out the online appeal form anyway, with limited details, as I’ve not actually been banned for invalid clicks, so I don’t really have anything to provide.

This is the response I get back:

Hello,

Thank you for providing us with additional information. However, after
thoroughly reviewing your account data and taking your feedback into
consideration, we have re-confirmed that your account poses a significant
risk to our advertisers. For this reason, we are unable to reinstate your
account. Thank you for your understanding.

As a reminder, if you have any questions about your account or the actions
that we have taken, please do not reply to this email. You can find more
information by visiting
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Google Ireland Ltd.
Gordon House
Barrow Street
Dublin 4
Ireland

Registered in Dublin, Ireland
Registration Number: 368047

It looks like a generic error they just send out when the appeal fails, there’s also a distinct lack of personal touches like there’s been in the past.

I conclude that my appeal application failed because firstly I wasn’t banned for invalid clicks, and secondly because I didn’t supply enough details about invalid clicks, which is mainly down to the fact that I never had an account in the first place to even generate invalid clicks.

I have come to the end of my tether with this…

Will I ever get a personal Google AdSense account?

And just when I think all is lost, I receive a reply…

Hi [name],

Thanks for writing in. I am sorry to know that you are still not able to
access your AdSense account. Please follow the steps below to resolve
this.

1. Please make sure that your AdSense account password is different from
your Google Account password.

2. You can reset it at https://www.google.com/adsense/assistlogin?hl=en_US

3. Once your passwords are different, you will need to log in to AdSense
with the AdSense email and password .

4. Once you log in to your AdSense account, please migrate using
https://www.google.com/adsense/migrate-login-1

Additionally, please know that your AdSense password is different from the
password you use to access other Google services. Our records show that
you have successfully reset he password for other Google services, but the
password for your AdSense account has not been reset. I suggest you visit
the link above and reset your password one more time.

We appreciate your continued patience and understanding.

For additional questions, I’d encourage you to visit the AdSense Help
Center ( http://www.google.com/adsense_help ) or the official AdSense blog
( http://adsense.blogspot.com?utm_source=txft ). Alternatively, feel free
to post your question on the AdSense Help Forum (
http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help?utm_source=txft ).

Sincerely,

Parvathi
The Google AdSense Team

SUCCESS!

After following the link to reset my password, receiving the email, then following THAT link, entering in a password over 7 chrs long, then returning to the login page, I can login!

I find there is a new set of terms and conditions, last updated 2008-02-25, I understand the gist, so I accept.

I then reach the migration link, as per the above email. I click “Yes – I’m the only one who logs in to this AdSense account” and press continue…

Which best describes you?
> I have an email address and password (Google Account) I already use with Google services like Gmail, Orkut, or the personalized home page.
Would you like to use your existing Google Account for AdSense?
> I’d like to use my existing Google account for AdSense.

Now I get the “Use an existing Google Account” dialogue box, where I can enter my Google Account details.

Final step is “Confirm your chosen AdSense login”, I confirm.

I AM IN! I AM ACTUALLY IN!

Just to check I’m not dreaming, I logout, and log back in, it accepts my Google Account details, no problem!

Once again, Google saves the day!

Problem solved, Well done Google!

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