Banned by Facebook
Less than 2 weeks ago Consmr opened its doors and tons of ratings poured in for products ranging from frozen foods to skin care products. We had notable press coverage of our launch. We saw dozens of user requests, got backlogged with lists of new products to add, and still have an inbox that won’t approach zero any time soon. All in all exciting stuff and I learned a few lessons along the way. Today I’m sharing one of them.
When you create a site or an app and build it upon another company’s platform, you’re subject to the whims of the people that run that platform. If you utilize something like Facebook Connect, you should realize the risk in letting a third-party extend to something as important as a login gateway. On Consmr, Facebook Connect is a highly visible option and a good percentage of our users have connected to our Facebook app and utilize it for posting to Facebook as well as sign-on. My goal with Consmr was to change social product discovery and one of the key ways to achieve this includes sharing products on Facebook. Therefore we needed a Facebook app so users could publish to Facebook. Since over a million websites have connected Facebook apps it didn’t seem like a risky proposition when we implemented it. I was wrong.
It was a very unique kind of panic that hit when I saw the ominous email in my inbox, which, of course I didn’t see immediately. We had been disabled. There was no warning. There was no explanation other than a template saying ‘you might have done one of 4 things, possibly’. If we were approaching some api limit or some threshold, we had no idea. If Facebook investigated and found out that we were distributing a virus, an immediate banning would be understandable. If we were spamming their network with a 419 scam, this would be understandable. But we weren’t doing anything like that. An app like ours shouldn’t warrant that kind of response.
Anyone who tried to register or log in to Consmr with Facebook was given a crude error message by Facebook. Did they really need to go so far as to prevent a simple log-in call? What harm is there in revoking other privileges but leaving core ones? That’s a huge oversight and one that they should have thought through.
Normally, this is the time when you pick up a phone and call someone. Except there’s no one to call. There’s no phone number. There’s not even an email address. A rumored $100 billion valuation and there’s no one to contact (at this point a “Who ya gonna call? Ghostbusters!” joke added a bit of levity to the situation). Your only recourse is a link to a FAQ that points to an appeals form that takes up to 48 hours to be reviewed. Needless to say I yelled the requisite “MARRRRKKKKK!” from The Social Network. Even worse, your app is 100% gone when you look at your account. You can’t even bring up your Insights account to see what, if anything, was wrong. It’s like you never had one.
Note that it did get resolved, things are fine now. And maybe down the line I’ll think it’s funny that Consmr got banned from Facebook so early into its life. I honestly wasn’t planning to write about this. I figured I would save it for war stories with other entreprenuers, but then I saw that we weren’t the only “normal” app banned by Facebook recently (http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=103438). Apparently they made some kind of change in their automated system and it’s incorrectly flagging apps. So now I’m sharing this story (and this is the only comment I’ll make on this topic) to remind everyone that relying on other platforms has its risks. It’s all a learning experience, and its been a wild ride so far…
ADDENDUM 6/27
Thanks everyone who pointed me in the direction of the TechCrunch post which also contains the official statement from Facebook about their new system which pulled down legit Facebook apps. Looks like enough noise was made by developers!
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