Facebook recently tweaked the algorithm that detects spammy applications. But something hasn’t gone down as expected as several genuine apps have been banned without any intimation to their respective owners.
According to Anthony Franco, co-founder of FriendCameo – a video chat on Facebook with over two million users, all of their users are receiving a 404 error when attempting to visit their application. And they have no way of reaching out to Facebook. On Hacker News he says,”Attempting to appeal to Facebook results in a generic email response instructing us to begin the application anew. Worst of all, deleting our application also deleted the photos our users took. We had a video chat application that allowed users to take pictures together with their friends. Over 1 million photo memories deleted by Facebook.”
In another case, developer of Grand Poker tells that the company spent huge amount of marketing dollars on adverts and product development. Furthermore, many of its paid customers demand for refunds or legal action. Apparantely, the company is feeling the pinch because Grand Poker happens to be the main source of revenue, and it is also funding other projects on facebook. The actions of Facebook might pretty much kill the company.
In yet another case, developer of Photo effect app says that three of their apps were banned even after following the TOS for app developers.
Developers are flooding online forums to vent their ire against lack of customer support on Facebook. Due to the volume of requests Facebook receives on a daily basis, it would probably take days if not months for apps to be reinstated. Upon contacting Facebook team, developers get an automated mail that states,
We’ve checked out the circumstances of your app’s removal, and we found that your app received strong negative feedback from users and their friends. Here are some types of feedback that our systems look for when users interact with apps: removing content generated by your app from the News Feed, labeling content by your app as ‘spam’, uninstalling or blocking your app, and not granting extended permissions requested by your app. These signals denote a poor user experience and amount to a violation of our Facebook Platform Principles, which is why your app was removed. Accordingly, we will not be able to restore your app. However, if you’d like to launch a new version of your app with a new app ID and canvas URL, please first make adjustments to ensure you’re providing a good user experience and meeting our policies.
According to a Facebook engineer who is working on the issue, Facebook has been getting a lot of user feedback recently, spiking significantly over the past week, on the amount of application spam people are seeing in their feeds and on their walls. The company has turned on a new enforcement system yesterday that took user feedback much more heavily into account. This resulted in a number of applications with high negative user feedback being disabled or having certain features disabled. In particular, many applications were disabled which posted to the walls of other users and had very high mark-as-spam numbers. And regarding poor feedback on apps for developers, the company says it is fixing the issue in its new Application Insights that will be launching over the next few weeks. The new dashboard will feature detailed information about both positive and negative engagement of the content your application generates.
Facebook has been under fire for pulling up apps and pages without intimating owners. The fact that the company uses bots to supervise content on the site makes matters worse. Also, the lack of proper customer support seem to the biggest pain in the ass for developers who are left with no option but to wait.
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