Comment by bogomipz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bogomipz | Hacker News Reader

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Note, if your account is already deactivated when you try to delete it you will again be asked for your password despite being already logged in. You will also be asked to complete a CAPTCHA. This will invariably result in the error message:

"Incorrect email/password combination"[1]

This is despite being logged in to FB with the same password.

The fix is to change your password, log out and log back in with the changed password. You will then be able to delete your account without issue.

Maybe the author could add this information to their post?

People have been asking on the FB help forum for years about how to resolve this error. FB refuses to answer anyone asking for help with this error. I'm guessing their failure to mention this or address this is quite intentional.

Oh and the audio versions of the CAPTCHAs are all completely unintelligible gibberish. I'm guessing this is intentional as well.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=4018056...

Oh dear, a bug! I wonder if it's a bug like the one that raided your linked contacts and wiped out people's email addresses and replaced them with a @facebook.com email. Or the multiple 'glitches' that would reset your privacy settings to more public.

Or the glitch that makes your input disappear if you try to use the site in desktop mode on a mobile phone. Malicious bugs are at this point an obvious FB tactic for plausible deniability in bad UX directed at users with certain behavior.

Or, not malicious at all, simply a bug. The 'delete user' functionality is going to be rarely used, so it gets hardly any QA test coverage, compared to the news feed page functionality used by many hundreds of millions of people.

>Or the multiple 'glitches' that would reset your privacy settings to more public.

I didn't know this was a real thing. I was getting ready to delete my account a couple days ago but I wanted to set all the privacy settings to be as strict as possible before I did it.

Sure enough, somehow all of the advertising and data retention settings were on the most open option possible, despite restricting them when I made the account and when I would occasionally check my privacy settings

Interesting... completely unrelated to the recent issues, a few months ago, I wanted to log in to Facebook from a mobile browser so I could follow a link without installing the app.

I also ran into a challenging captcha and a page saying my account had been “locked”, but I was still able to log in. After logging in, I received a phone call from Palo Alto. When I let the call go to voicemail, it left a message consisting only of a recorded voice saying “goodbye”. Perhaps this was some poorly-implemented two-factor auth, but in context, I felt like Facebook was intentionally making the experience of using a mobile browser unpleasant to encourage use of the app.

Sounds like the delete your account page has similar “issues”.

From my experience optimizing signup funnels, it made me wonder if somebody is doing that work in reverse here. Are they getting a bonus based on what percentage of people abandon the account deletion process?

Maybe I’m just being paranoid, and optimizing those flows is simply not a high priority. But for a tech-focused company that tends to operate at a pretty high level, it felt like they are actively making things more difficult. Like this was the shittiest experience bright minds could come up with.

That's really weird. I didn't do any of the stuff you said lead up to the call but I also got a voicemail from Palo Alto that just said "Goodbye" I joked with my friends it was that California was about to fall off the US. Wonder if it is related to facebook or something.

I definitely got it within a few minutes of logging into Facebook from a mobile browser, which is not something I normally do... maybe someone was trying to log into your account?

I use only the mobile website for years and they are slowly removing features. The last I noticed that was removed was image upload in a comment.

Dark UX

I had disabled my account a week ago, not realizing there was a separate delete option, then deleted it a couple days ago. I didn't run into this issue; I signed into my "disabled" account first, then went to the delete link and it worked.

It's a strange bug for sure. Friend I helped had to change their password 2-3 times before it would go through.

We typed it very carefully. Tried copying from notepad, the same copying used to reset the password.

It indeed felt like Hotel California, as someone below compared.

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