Facebook Outcast

Last night I got kicked off of Facebook. Apparently I violated their terms of service. All I was doing was using a feature on their site. I wanted to change my personal feed from just this blog to my soup.io feed which contains an aggregation of a variety of my content. So I changed the feed url. Previewed it, then wanted to see if I could get the links to work from a couple of the sources, so I used a different soup.io feed. That didn't work, so I went back to the original. This must have triggered some "abuse" flag and I got dumped. I like to think I got Zuckerberged.

Now I can't log in and they are being pretty non-responsive. This is all the info they provide:

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

I can understand having these kinds of safety measures, but I've never encountered such a thing before. I was using their tools according to how they instructed. Enter a feed URL, then preview it. I expect if you don't like the way things look in the "preview" then it would be okay to change things. That's all that I did.

I hope that they reinstate me soon so I can get back to poking people.

Comments

[Christopher Clay]

Incidentally this happened to me too the first time I played with their import feature -- with a soup.io feed as well. To the best of my knowledge our feeds are no different than anyone else's though, it must be some kind of volume-based block: I was doing the same as you, adding a feed, trying to preview, not quite understanding how it worked, removing, adding again.

When I checked my email, I had received a "Our systems indicate that you've been misusing certain features on the site. This email serves as a warning." email, and then no more than a single minute later three (!) mails saying "Your account has been disabled for persistent misuse of the site".

They responded to my support email four days later:
"Your account was disabled because you exceeded Facebook's limits on multiple occasions when importing notes, despite having been warned to slow down. However, after reviewing your situation, we have reactivated your account, and you should now be able to log in. Please be aware that if your account is disabled again, we will not be able to reactivate it. Once logged in, please slow down the rate at which you import notes."

Why they don't just limit the import rate themselves instead of sending emails when they think someone's overusing a feature is a mystery to me. Anyway, good luck with that account...