Hacker News Reader

Comment by anthony_franco | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, our application was also a victim of this widespread banning. We built up a user base of over 2 millions users. As of yesterday, they're all receiving a 404 error when attempting to visit our application. And we have no way of reaching them.

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. It's just a sad situation overall.

View on HN

Wow, that is truly appalling. Hopefully they can restore all the pictures, I doubt any piece of data is every TRULY deleted from Facebook.

It's really a shame that a big company like this can just stomp all over the little guys, and we are absolutely powerless to them.

I'm sorry that Facebook fucked you over like that - but this is also an excellent reminder to be mindful of backups. Throwing something on facebook or Flickr doesn't count.

Just to clarify, these photos were uploaded directly into the user's own Facebook albums. They viewed the photos outside of the scope of our application, along with all their other Facebook photos. It was these photos that were deleted when our application was banned.

Even if we had backups, it wouldn't mean much. Facebook revoked our OAuth access. So we're unable to re-upload the photos for our users.

Oh, I didn't mean from your end - I meant that I, as a Facebook user, shouldn't assume my photos are safe just because they're in an FB album.

And, really? They deleted photos that the users uploaded themselves? Or did they go through your app to do so?

Either way, I'd be pissed. And they wouldn't care. :/

We hope to help solve at least the backup component of this at: http://lockerproject.org/. This just helps reinforce, in our eyes, that we need to push hard to get this in front of people as soon as possible.

This is exactly why I'm contributing to the Locker Project. I personally have data on tribe.net I'm concerned about losing.

I could write a scraper myself, but I know a ton of people who feel the same way. These are people who aren't programmers but would personal copies of the digital snowflakes they've created on that site. It's far more useful to build a Locker connector that anyone can use to sync their contacts, messages, photos, etc.

This is a big reminder to all devs, make facebook an optional part of your application and that it can stand alone by itself if facebook gets revoked. Even if you make it seamless don't make it depend on facebook internally, make it that you can flip a switch and send an announcement email/sms to all of your users that provide it. I was surprised how many facebook apps start completely dependent like this and stay like that for years.

Have you considered taking legal action against Facebook? They've done some pretty terrible things, but that's truly horrible (and probably illegal). They just flipped the switch and deleted everything?

Wow, that sucks. Condolences, Anthony...

I appreciate it. But it's sad to say that many others have lost way more than we have. Here's one example: http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=103428

yah Grand Poker seems kaput on FB.

It's their dreaded friday push which usually breaks things until monday. Dont expect reinstatement until then.

Is this really something that happens regularly, to the point where you have a name for it? I've had several issues with the facebook platform in the past, but if breakage is really this common why aren't they doing anything about it? (And why not do code releases on Monday at the very least?)

It's not a specific day, it's all days, but most of the bugs i remember were not fixed on weekends. Here's a bug i was watching:

http://bugs.developers.facebook.net/show_bug.cgi?id=16197 aka http://bugs.developers.facebook.net/show_bug.cgi?id=16191

This was a severe bug despite its misleading title, our users got only blank pages in IE and links did not work . It was pushed on a Thursday , then fixed some time by Monday, then next wednesday it was broken again, and a fix came a week later. [http://www.facebook.com/eggbuddies/posts/10150171378998545] Shit happens a lot more often than one would expect in facebook.

For a better treatise, read this developer's lament:

http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?id=100175

P.s. I laughed hard when i saw this video: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2594083

The "dreaded friday push"? That's weird, since this happened "as of yesterday".

(Every Thursday feels like a week?)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com