My level 7 wife with 1,687 contributions got an email this morning saying the following:
Your account was banned from publishing reviews due to a violation of our policies. Furthermore, all of your other reviews have also been removed.
That’s crazy. It’s even crazier that Google pulls some Paypal shenanigans and doesn’t even tell you what policy was violated. No one likes starting their morning like this. I had her file the appeal but what it shouldn’t even get to this.
What can I do to help her?
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Hi @benuecker ,
Thank you for reaching out! Your wife will need to fill in the appeal form and it will be reviewed by the relevant team. As additional info, the Local Guides team may remove users from the program if their contributions violate our Review Policy, Local Guides Program rules and/or Google’s Terms of Service.
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Hi @benuecker
It sounds very upsetting.
Suspended local guides can find help in my tutorial called How to Get In and Out of Trouble as a Local Guide.
Remember:
- It might not be possible to get unsuspended
- It can be a lot of work cleaning up whatever mistakes were made
Normally it is not very difficult to spot review violations. Maybe you can do it for her if they are still visible when she is logged in.
This new warning is new since I wrote the Suspension tutorial, so if OK with you I would like to understand better and maybe see a copy of what she reviewed. Feel free to contact me in private via PM if you prefer.
Best of luck
Morten
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Hi AngieYC
This is the part that is upsetting and it’s done time and time again. Its like being arrested, convicted and punished and as the person being arrested you are only told that you broke the law and never told which law.
As additional info, the Local Guides team may remove users from the program if their contributions violate our Review Policy, Local Guides Program rules and/or Google’s Terms of Service.
The user should be told what why they are being banned.
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Thank you and it is upsetting to her. While I appreciate the link it should not be the user’s responsibility to try and figure out how they violated a policy. It should be Google’s responsibility to TELL the user and allow them to correct it. I can see having different rules for someone new/probationary but she is literally the opposite of that.
Knowing you might have just lost all those submissions is nuts. Google makes money off all this free content. It should be in Google’s best interest to work with their volunteers and not to discard them like so many google products.
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Hi @benuecker
You’re totally right, it’s supposed to be Google’s responsibility to tell you what it is “they” consider you have violated, not you, but you just saw their cliche way of replying: “thank you for reaching out” with an exclamation mark ! and bringing the value of such a precious expression (thank you) down and down.
This system is such a frail thing to count on, i personally don’t have no sense of proud and honor having 8M views, i provided proof at the end of this thread that Google is actually lying about the number of viewers.
Anyway, hope you get proper help to retrieve your property back 
.
Hi @benuecker ,
Thank you for sharing, you will be contacted privately for further instruction.
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