Saturday, December 01, 2007

Facebook Gave Me The Axe

And i'm not really sure why... But last night, when I tried to get online, I got this message:

 

Your account has been disabled by an administrator. If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page here.

 

So, of course, I email the administrator, asking why it happened, and what I can do to fix my account. After some more digging, I found this:

"Facebook enforces limits on the site in order to prevent certain actions that can be considered abusive. Your account has been disabled for persistent and rapid use of a certain feature. Unfortunately, for security reasons, we will not be able to further explain these limits. "

Now the only rapid thing that I remember happening was my iPod touch trying to connect to facebook, so I'm being banned for using an apple product that is has the shakes?

"Facebook has limits in place to prevent abuse of our features and to protect users from potential spam."

That's well and good, we all hate spam, I hate spam. I even hate spam, the 'meat'! but again, what does this have to do with my ipod trying to connect?

"Unfortunately, Facebook cannot provide any specifics on the rate limits that we enforce. Please know, however, that the speed at which you are acting and the sheer number of actions you have made are both taken into account."

Um, ok... So you can't be specific about what I allegedly did, and you can't be specific on how many times I did it... but I did it fast and often.

After doing some other research, it appears that FB does a lot of things like this for a multitude of reasons. People with fake profiles, people with fake names, people claiming to be other people or organizations... Of course, i'm none of those...

As you can probably tell, i'm a bit confused by how this happened. Anyone that knows me knows that I'm not a spammer, not trying to fake anything.. But for some reason, the FB overlords decided that I was a threat to their clean, shiny social utopia of pirates, ninjas, zombies, snowball fights and superpokes.

Like I said, I sent an email to their customer support team, in  the hopes that this is just a machine error, and my status can be reinstated, but this event is very telling about FB. No warning, no 'hey, quit that or we'll kick you out!" to which I would reply, 'Quit what?' and this would have never happened.

What's sad is that FB is so much better than myspace, and I'd rather not go back there for my social fixes.

 

So, feel free to comment here if you want to get in touch with me, as I was kicked out of the cool people club for reasons unknown to me.

 

At least I still have fun with Rock Band.

10 comments:

Nesting Guest said...

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Anonymous said...

Yikes, that sucks!

Hey, whey did you leave xanga?

Bob said...

Guess you can always start fresh with FB again??

Phil said...

I left Xanga because I didn't like the ad based road that they were taking... Plus, using blogger gives me a bit more freedom.

As far as FB goes, i actually did start a new one, but now that my old one has been reinstated, i have TWO!

Stefaan Van Damme said...

how long before you got reinstated ?

Phil said...

It took 2 days and an email to facebook.

Stefaan Van Damme said...

do you have to send an email, or is it just ok to wait couple days ?

did they actually respond to your email ?

Phil said...

Well, once I realized what happened, I sent them an email and waited. Eventually, they responded and warned me not to "do it again", whatever it was that I "did" to justify the ban-hammer in the first place.

Stefaan Van Damme said...

thank you for the quick respond, guess i'll just have to wait couple days ;)

greets

Phil said...

Good luck with it. I remember how I felt when it happened to me.