My account got banned back in August because of an FB bug and a misunderstanding. My colleague, David Ascher, blogged about it:
The most recent and spectacular challenge we had was when our marketing lead, an avid Facebook user, had built a Facebook group to communicate with a group of people who’d signed up to be our alpha testers. Due to apparent bugs in the group communication mechanisms, he tried to send them each a message to let them know that the app was live and that they should go ahead and start testing it. This promptly triggered a spam filter in facebook, and got his account banned. An appeal with customer service failed miserably (apparently they don’t seem to even review appeals), and it looked for a while like he had lost his personal Facebook account (with all its data) because he was trying to do his job as a Facebook application developer. Not good. Luckily, friendly folks on the #facebook IRC channel, including a Facebook employee, helped to get that resolved. It did drive home the point that we’ve all felt that there’s something problematic about the complete ownership of personal data by Facebook. That control, combined with a hair-trigger banning without warning and a probably overwhelmed appeals process, is scary.
Some form of data backup will have to be created, otherwise FB will be more susceptible to the open social network movement. I'd be surprised if we don't see something on this front in the next 3-6 months...
Boris M. Silver
· 2 years ago
Back when I first started my FB oriented company, I got banned from facebook 3 times in a timespan of 2 weeks.
It was intense to lose it all.
Joe Grossberg
· 2 years ago
My brother got booted twice (second one was permanent) for *emailing too often*.
Not spam, mind you, but emails to people he knows.
I am actually glad -- because he needs to look for a job instead of flirting with chicks.
But on the second time he lost all his emails, friends, app history and other info permanently.
Adam Sweet
· 2 years ago
You have to be really careful if your business relies on someone else's discretion, namely Facebook, Myspace or some such other portal. When Yahoo first released web sites, I built my company website and subsequent shopping cart on a Yahoo website, but as I learned over the course of the next few years, the site was frequently down and frequently buggy - which ended up in lost sales and customers. When Myspace came out a few years later, I created a business that relied on traffic from Myspace, and utilized the bulletins, comments and message options for marketing (not spamming). It became prohibitive, however, once Myspace implemented the Captcha bypass system, putting a series of bottlenecks in place that eliminated the potential of a small business like mine utilizing the platform for even the simplest of messages to customers.
Now Facebook. What is next? Will they implement Captcha or some such other system to slow spammers? It has potential to ruin so many other online businesses...I wonder if it's worth it.
some guy
· 2 years ago
about 10 days ago an article appeared in a british tabloid about student from a posh school in the uk having set up a "dogging" group (dogging = having sex in public parking lots) as a JOKE. the school kicked out 2 students over it and the group was shut down by FB. AFAIK it doesnt exist anymore. some kid made a fake profile in the name of the headmaster of the school in question, that got shut down in a matter of days too. so i wonder if FB is chatting to this headmaster and doing whatever he asks? no laws were ever broken ... info here. this amounts to censorship and lack of a GSOH - not cool!
All Comments
The most recent and spectacular challenge we had was when our marketing lead, an avid Facebook user, had built a Facebook group to communicate with a group of people who’d signed up to be our alpha testers. Due to apparent bugs in the group communication mechanisms, he tried to send them each a message to let them know that the app was live and that they should go ahead and start testing it. This promptly triggered a spam filter in facebook, and got his account banned. An appeal with customer service failed miserably (apparently they don’t seem to even review appeals), and it looked for a while like he had lost his personal Facebook account (with all its data) because he was trying to do his job as a Facebook application developer. Not good. Luckily, friendly folks on the #facebook IRC channel, including a Facebook employee, helped to get that resolved. It did drive home the point that we’ve all felt that there’s something problematic about the complete ownership of personal data by Facebook. That control, combined with a hair-trigger banning without warning and a probably overwhelmed appeals process, is scary.
To read the whole post, go to http://ascher.ca/blog/2007/08/17/a-facebook-story/
Some form of data backup will have to be created, otherwise FB will be more susceptible to the open social network movement. I'd be surprised if we don't see something on this front in the next 3-6 months...
It was intense to lose it all.
Not spam, mind you, but emails to people he knows.
I am actually glad -- because he needs to look for a job instead of flirting with chicks.
But on the second time he lost all his emails, friends, app history and other info permanently.
Now Facebook. What is next? Will they implement Captcha or some such other system to slow spammers? It has potential to ruin so many other online businesses...I wonder if it's worth it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reigate_Grammar_Sc...
FB's a nice toy, but I'll stick with Google, thanks.
Alexandra Everist
Author of "A Katrina Moment"