Crazy People Work From Home…

A few days ago, I wrote an article that was republished a number of times around the internet. In it I detailed a little bit of the angst being felt by people who had been banned or suspended while diddling around in the social network - Facebook.

Go ahead, say it - so what ? Granted that being suspended from facebook pales next to world hunger and global melting or is that global warming. But, if you were the cherished one expected to invite 600 wedding guests to your mother-in-laws anniversary and suddenly you got suspended after sending out only 20 invites, well you know then that being banned at such an auspicious time is going to look a little suspicious, right?

So, if you just got suspended while doing someone else a favor, and you are sitting around reading this article and wondering if your suspension might get released tomorrow. Dream on. Same for if you ignored the warning suspension messages and went direct to a facebook ban. Those invitations didn’t go out and you know you are in a pile of deep do do. Look around the front page of facebook, the address is there for dispute resolution. Get a message to them right away, but don’t hold your breath while doing this.

Oh I forgot, there is another class of people feeling angst too. These are the mom and pop type companies who have decided to use facebook for marketing and who got a little too aggressive with their marketing when they saw that things were looking up. They may be using up to fake profile of some gorgeous woman who has 3-4000 *friends*

Because of how low key that warning message is, a busy user can click right on through that most important of stop signs. And in that article, I covered how easy this was to do too.

However, what I didn’t go into at that time was the myriad of ways one can get suspended and banned. Here they are, and facebook says that not reading the TOA Terms of Agreement is not an excuse.

Nudity. Is it art or pornography? Want to test the fine line? Well, if you want to Facebook is a great place to rationalize this sort of thing. If they deem that picture of your ex was not **Art** then art you go, my friend. Yeah, I wouldn’t suggest you test them in this regard with anything less than a well recognized international art piece - lets say something of the stature of a “Mona Lisa” Oddly enough, writing to too many people before they accept you as a friend - looks like spam. Writing too many times in a short period of time on group walls. Stay under 30 per day and don’t test that number to seriously.

Using images without permission - you are asked about this. Using facebook’s email facility as if it were IM or MSN or Yahoo chat. Odd that on a social network you can get banned for that, but there you go. Facebook has a chat facility and they would rather you use that rather than abuse the email in that way. Promotion of racism, hate mail or any of the regular sort of utterances that would have gotten you in trouble outside of facebook too. People engaging in this thing shouldn’t be surprised if their accounts are permanently suspended.

We see two forms of general problems that people fall prey to just before getting banned or suspended. One of them, which includes posting obvious un-artistic nude pictures and hacking etc., is a pretty blatant activity on the part of the user and the reasons for getting banned are obvious enough.

The other “I got banned, woe be me look” is more frequently caused by the user inadvertently triggering a time constraint applied to **spammers**.

The other class of activity is time based. Sending 400 emails in a month is generally ok. Sending 400 emails all in one day is not. When you get a warning about a certain activity, lets say it was writing on walls, you are NOT told how long before you can continue that activity.

If however you are reading this after having gotten suspended or banned, there is a resolution email on the site that you can attempt to plead your case to.