Go figure. The more I dig into this, the more I am really upset with Google for doing this. They have launched this new tool to keep people safe... nothing wrong with that. But they didn't tell the webmasters about it beforehand, and its a mess. On their webmaster support forums, people are going ballistic. The information they provide about the problems is almost useless.... kind of like a Microsoft error message. Then their timing for a "re review" is days, not minutes. At this point, the whole part of the site to request a review seems to be missing for our site. And there is NO ONE to talk to in order to get help. So the webmaster is just basically screwed.

So back to our problem. Back many years ago our site was hacked. I believe this is a remnant of that problem. All the posts in the database prior to 2003 have a hidden iframe tag. A lot of the older forums had html enabled. I no longer allow html in posts, but didn't go back and alter that flag on all the old forums. I've now changed that setting which makes all these iframe tags benign, and I'm working with our server guys to figure out the best way to remove it. I am not positive why the newer posts are getting flagged. I think it has to do with Google crawling the site... finding a problem... and then making everything along the path flagged/blocked. So if they enter the site to crawl on this thread and then jump from links to other pages that have the problem, bingo. So its slowly destroying the whole site with each crawl. Thankfully they've not flagged the home page yet. There may be some other problems, but I believe this is the bulk of it. This stuff is so old that I doubt the destination problem site is even still around.

I can't believe Google has done this. Its just a stupid way to do something when they have the power to destroy a site at the flip of a switch. They should have rolled this out in a test mode and let the webmasters see the results so they could fix the problems before it went to the public. Most webmasters are not intentionally serving anything bad. And a lot of them have things like this going on. I applaud them for trying to keep the internet safe, but this is not the way to do it.

I don't know when this will end at this point because I can't even see a way to request them to review the site again. I have found that if I use Firefox on my Mac, I don't have the blocking going on, but I do in Safari. I guess using a different browser may be the best course until we get this rectified.

I do apologize for the inconvenience that this is causing. I hope we have it fixed soon.

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Mike - Been Converged?