Nearly a year ago, I wrote : "I've been writing on and off for something called Suite 101 and then continued:

"If you read them, click on some of the ad links for me. This is the way we are supposed to make money, although I am told that you don't make much, and I certainly haven't made any so far, although the stats say that I have accumulated the princely sum of $6.... "

Here a post-script to this. If people are inclined to click through the ads on a friend's page- don't. If Google detects (or thinks it detects) ad fraud, it gets very heavy. Perfectly fair, and I should have thought of that - duh.

Anyway Suite 101 doesn't offer the writer any chance to explain, deal with or change if Google objects to the pattern of clicks. It simply removes all the writer's articles, immediately and permanently, with no procedure for arbitration. This happened to me. Apparently many writers were wiped at the same time as me, in a sort of purge, and didn't know why. Perhaps their friends had clicked their page ads. Some of them were terribly upset to lose all the work they had done in anticipation of future earnings.

For me it was not an unhappy ending. I had become embarrassed about my articles - formulaic, hack and rigidly constrained. I didn't become a writer to do that. Editors I hoped to interest in my writing skills were googling me and coming up with this stuff - but I could not get them off line.

In this, as in other ways, the writer for Suite 101 has no real control.