Support forum being blocked by Google

[mig]

As you may have noticed, this forum has been blocked by Google on Sept 24th, under the official reason of containing spam or malicious software. If you are a user of this forum, you know this is not even remotely true. We immediately requested a manual review but it did not happen nor did we receive any response from Google.

The forum has just been reopened a couple of hours ago, as the result of a formal notice from our attorney, threatening them of a legal action.

At this time, we just don't know if it is a deliberate action from Google against us  (they already forbid the Chrome version of Video DownloadHelper to download from Youtube) or an automatic closing due to a campaign from competitors reporting the forum as being spam and Google being very bad at having a human checking facts before closing a forum used by millions (currently ~5 million active.users of the extension and ~1 billion installs over 15 years).

The point is that we lack contacts at Google and in this situation with our main work tool being disabled, we have no choice other than legal. This just proved to be efficient but it costs a lot of money and we might not be able to afford doing so the next times they will block our forum.

If you have contacts at Google or insider information, please share with us, or give visibility to this Google bad move so that they might think again next time.

Thanks for reading.

[Jaymo]

Whatever happened to NNTP, ?

[Wild Willy]

Michel, how did you discover we were back on the air? I had been checking the URL once
or twice a day since we disappeared some time on 9/23. Somebody had posted something
here & CCed it to me just before noon on 9/23. I checked the group some time later in
the afternoon or early evening & I got the banned message. So we went off the air some
time in the afternoon (eastern US time) on 9/23. It occurred to me to check about 05:00
on 10/4 (this morning) & we were here. That says nothing about when we went back live.
It could have been minutes before or hours before. I don't remember when I had checked
in the time before that. Did they communicate with you at all? Or did you just stumble
upon it being available again, same as I did?

Did you find anything here that could possibly have been misconstrued as objectionable?
Did you remove anything to make the group reappear?

Have you had any communication at all from any official Google source? Have they
explained how they reached their erroneous decision to suspend us? Are we still
vulnerable to being suspended again? Had we ever been suspended before that time this
past March? I don't suppose there's anything we can do that we aren't already doing to
avoid this in the future. Their suspensions have been capricious, frivolous,
unjustifiable, so I can't imagine what there might be that we could do.

[Maximillium]

Yup & ditto to the above, and did we get blocked & unblocked or did we also lose the history, all the "saved" previous messages?

[Wild Willy]

It looks like everything is here, but I haven't looked at the whole forum. It does say
at the top of the forum home page that there are over 9,000 threads here. That sounds
like everything is here.

[blunt rapture]

Thanks for being there.