from Hacker News

Banned By Facebook. Advice?

by zachster on 1/20/11, 2:35 AM with 5 comments

My Facebook app, Profile Banner rose to over 1.25m users in less than a month. Facebook just shut it down for violating their terms. I was helping users tag themselves in photos that were not of themselves (possibly).

For sure a contributing factor was that I also allowed people to tag their friends in banners too, but I gave people an easy way to block themselves from that. And a tiny percentage of users ever used this feature. Really, I thought FB would at least contact me requesting a change before taking this drastic action. I'm naive.

Does anyone have any advice on how I might be able to recover from this?

FYI, HN user gdeglin called that this was going to happen. I guess a similar thing happened to one of his apps.

  • by cd34 on 1/20/11, 2:41 AM

    Find the section of the T&C that most likely deals with why you were terminated. Fix your app to address that concern. Grovel and pray.

    Whatever you do, don't slam it up on another url and keep going - because they'll take more drastic action - perhaps banning all of your apps.

    I know an app that was in a grey area, he adjusted his app and was reinstated in a few days.

  • by mbenjaminsmith on 1/20/11, 3:50 AM

    I don't know how Facebook is re profanity, but maybe it was also the "FUCK U" banner?