Hey everyone

I wanted to reach out to the collecting community since I’ve been getting a lot of notices from people (and thank you for that) about Google reporting the Gunnery as a Phishing site.

Right off the bat, the site it safe. If you actually search “Imperial Gunnery Forum” in Google you won’t see the tag that it’s a malicious site; you'll only get it if you come to the forum. From what we’ve gathered, and it’s admittedly scant, a person or group of people have reported the site as unsafe and it’s flagged the site by google, which then propagates through other search engines. We are working with Google through the consoles they provide and have requested a review after doing some back-end work. If you visit the forum, just click “visit this unsafe site” and you’ll get to the forum without incident.

Since this appears to be done maliciously I’m also going to see what legal remedies I can have against the person(s) responsible. I’m requesting the IP addresses be released or I’m going to give Google our IP logs.

If you can, please go to https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_error/?hl=en-US and report that the site (www.imperialgunneryforum.com) is safe I’d appreciate it. You can check on Google’s Transparency pages to verify we are safe as well.

If anyone has a question or a concern feel free to reach out. Rest assured, we are safe and secure.

Guys may have noticed a slow down in traffic recently and this is the biggest factor I think. Google takes their sweet time about helping with these things and the admin and mods (mainly admin) have been trying to get this resolved.

Report submitted the site is WELL safe

I have also reported the site as safe. Very annoying to get the warning every time I try to access TIG and have to click on a few more links to get here.

I never have any issues linking to this site myself but submitted the site is safe as well.

We passed the audit! All is well!!

Good. Thanks to everyone who reported the site as safe. This morning was the first time in five days I was able to log in normally without having to go through security settings and reporting as safe. Nice work whoever it was that maliciously reported us

So great to have this over. Thanks for those who helped out and reported it as safe for us.

Any clues to who was behind this?

I think John and Google are still checking into this. Google requires everything to be done through forms you have to fill out and lots of red tape to jump through. John began the process as soon as it was discovered to be reported so about 5-6 days ago and it just got cleared today. That is an indication of how long it was being worked on behind the scenes.

walkie wrote:

Any clues to who was behind this?

Bryan kind of summed it up. Google is an impossible mountain to climb. I'm trying to request the IP address of where the report came from. The pages that were flagged were obscure and untouched for years. So somebody made the effort. If Google won't release it, I'm going to offer every IP log.

I thought it was just my computer being weird. Glad all is fixed now.

Sorry you guys had to go through this and I am happy to hear the issue has been resolved now.

If I understand things correctly, it is very alarming that one false report from a low life can block an entire 100% safe site.
I had assumed that Google would at least check any report before deciding to block a page. What a mess.

Be sure to name and shame the culprit once we know who they are, then kick em out!

glad everything is ok , sorry this happened

yep , sorry this happened to TIG but it sounds as if it's resolved now

What's weird to me is , like Larry , I never had any problems logging in or never saw any kind of warning message :scratch:

Hope you find out who did it

ourchickenshack wrote:

yep , sorry this happened to TIG but it sounds as if it's resolved now

What's weird to me is , like Larry , I never had any problems logging in or never saw any kind of warning message :scratch:

Hope you find out who did it

I never recieved any warning either. It has something to do with security settings and cookies on the computer. I guess my security settings are lower than others. I never got any type of message at all.

me either maybe I should ramp up my settings

trappedtexan wrote:

ourchickenshack wrote:

yep , sorry this happened to TIG but it sounds as if it's resolved now

What's weird to me is , like Larry , I never had any problems logging in or never saw any kind of warning message :scratch:

Hope you find out who did it

I never recieved any warning either.  It has something to do with security settings and cookies on the computer.  I guess my security settings are lower than others.  I never got any type of message at all.  

Like James, Bryan and Bill, I didn't have have problems on my iPad :scratch:
Hope the rat is caught thou

Thanks everyone for the support.

For guys like James and Larry, you might have your google settings set to not show it. I'm not totally fluent in how it works but you might not have safe searching on or something to that affect

Marco - I agree 100%. What really is sticking in my craw is the that using Google Console for Webmasters (if you're not using it, sign up for it even though "webmaster" seems so 90's) it showed two pages with flags. Literally neither page has been touched since 2010. On top of that, Google Transparency showed us as a completely clean site. Try and figure that one out.

In so many words Google isn't about to give up any info and/or take mine without it being a battle. I've no real material damage either as this was short lived. If it was bad I'd fight more. So I'm going to just watch IP's (they have to land here to report the page) and see what happens.

I'll say this, it's a pain..

Glad this is fixed and it seems like an annoying process to go through.