Yesterday morning I tried signing up as ad publisher on Ad4Games.com. I own few gaming sites and want to show more targeted advertisements, so this ad network seemed as a decent choice. I saw them serving banners on few other websites. When I tried to register, the town I live in is comprised of two words, as a result their system told me that only the following characters can be used “A-Z and a-z” (as seen in the image on the right). Seriously now?! The first two two word city names that come in my mind are Los Angeles and New York.
I contacted their support staff and my conversation follow:
[11:39] yvebts: Hello
[11:40] ad4game: hi
[11:41] yvebts: I am trying to register on ad4game.com as a publisher, but your system will not accept my city, because the name has a space in it
[11:41] yvebts: I can’t use – or _ because they are not accepted characters
[11:42] ad4game: just use no space
[11:42] ad4game: or write
[11:42] ad4game: space
[11:42] ad4game: we will adjust it
[11:42] ad4game: what is your website please?
[11:42] yvebts: OK. thank you
[11:43] yvebts: hivemindsgaming.com and clanmp.us
[11:51] ad4game: allright
[11:51] ad4game: i see you havent finished registering yet
[11:53] yvebts: I will attempt to complete the registration at a latter time. Thank you for you assistance.
Even though I know that I can send a letter to any one address in the US just by writing down the ZIP code and 4 digit extension, I wouldn’t write “space” in the name, because it will irritate me when I see it printed on the envelop. I have observed and have experienced the results of doing something silly like that and from people making assumptions. To top that, I have seen some really odd town names, so if they actually have someone who manually enters the address, why would they think of changing the town name?
Lastly, I tried registering last night and right before I typed this post. They still have not fixed this. As a company that claims to have been in the game advertising business for over 5 years you would think that they are quick to respond and fix issues in their system. Ad4Games.com, if you ever read this, if you have really been in the business for over 5 years just think about the number of publishers you have lost on. Even worse, the amount of revenue from advertisers you have lost on, because your advertiser sign up form has the same issue. I am not going to register until this is fixed. Probably eventually I will forget about your site and will not register at all.
BTW, what does “… been in the gaming industry for more than 5 years.” mean? You have been designing, developing, selling, promoting …. games?!
UPDATE (2008-10-27): It appears that the type of character limitations in the sign up form has been fixed. When I was signing up I noticed that Ad4Game had made a positive step in password security by mandating that passwords be alphanumeric. Good job.
2 responses to “Ad4Game.com fix your web forms”
They use Adjuggler and have been down for the last 2 weeks. Terrible system
Hi Alex,
When I checked their site over the weekend, it was back online. It was displaying their home page, although when I visited it few minutes ago, it was displaying the standard “domain not used” GoDaddy page. A quick check of ad4games.com’s domain record shows that the ad4games.com domain is not due to expire 29-07-2009.
In my experience with them, it seem like it was a one man show, who had another job. It was hard to get a hold of the support staff, responses took a while, and it seemed like every time I was in contact with support, I was always communicating with the same person – James Vybihal.
An attempt to open an affiliate account with Ad4Games stretched for months, something I have not ever experienced before. Looking through my email longs, it seems that the whole process stretched over a period longer than five months. One would wonder why I kept at it! The answer is that even though I was denied at the end, I was initially approved. After a month of trying to get a hold of someone, I received a response that my account was approved and I was asked to submit specs on the ad sizes I needed. So I did, immediately. I did not receive a response and access to my account was never made available. It took me another month to two months of emailing and trying to make contact over IM to receive the same response – the account is approved, please sent required ad sizes. So, I did again. But the results were the same. So I started sending emails, again. Only after wasting my time for another month and a half to be told that supposedly the websites I had submitted, and were approved, did not qualify.
To me it seemed like a brush off, a response from a person who just did not want to deal with the situation. From all the sites I have seen their banners on, I though that they were making some good money. I don’t see why they would be out of business, unless it is due to bad management or they are changing DNS servers. If it is the latter, I should not see the GoDaddy page, but a blank or error page when I try to visit the site, until the changes have propagated though the ‘Net.