Banned By Facebook. Advice?

[zachster]

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.

[cd34]

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.

[zachster]

Ah, thanks very much for this advice. That would be great.

I did relaunch the app, but with all the violations disabled. I sent them a message explaining. I had users who were kind of desperate to get their content out of the app.

But maybe I should take even that down? What do you think?

[cd34]

I might not have done that until I heard back from one of their compliance group so that you had a contact, but, you might be ok.

I would still petition to get the original app back online so that they do see that you fixed it. Regrettably, that is one difficult group to get quick feedback from because of the volume of tickets they review.

[mbenjaminsmith]

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

[zachster]

I don't think they have a policy on that, do they? I was moderating out obviously objectionable content. I actually had a pretty lengthy thread on my App Wall regarding the F U banners and I felt like the community thought it was better to let that stuff go than to be overly strict.