Comment by mryan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mryan | Hacker News Reader

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While I would also be quite irate if I was in your position, it does not sound like this can be blamed entirely on FB. My first parsing of "Make <your name> a Test Account" is that it means "the FB account with <your name> will be converted from a real account in to a test account".

Also,

> "To make a test account, register on Facebook as you normally would. Then, when logged in to the test account, go to this URL"

That also seems quite clear to me: Create a test account Log in to the test account Click "Make <your name> a Test Account"

That being said, I do agree - this should have required more confirmation. This could have been avoided with a simple message box saying "Hold up, are you sure? <Your name> will no longer be a normal FB user. All <Your name's> friends will be deleted, and you will not be able to admin any apps. If you want a test account in addition to your normal account, you need to..."

While I'm sympathetic to that being your first parsing, it certainly seems a bit off to me.

For example, if you pressed a button saying "Make myran a Cake" you probably would expect it to give you a cake.

If it made you INTO a cake, you'd probably be in tiers. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

I'm not sure your example works because one would not normally expect a person to be turned into a cake, so the "give you a cake" reading is going to seem much more plausible.

If the button said "Make myran a genius", what would you expect to happen?

Like thalur says, the cake analogy is not entirely accurate, but you make a good point - the phrasing of the statement is ambiguous, and could be taken to mean two different things:

Convert <item> in to <an object> Create <an object> belonging to <item>

Given the ambiguity, FB should probably tweak the wording to make it as obvious as possible.

Off-topic, but I am always impressed with how people share differing viewpoints on HN. It actually feels like a "forum" in the original sense of the word, instead of a shouting match between warring egos with something to prove.

Here's a super-obvious fix: Facebook should show you what they're deleting.

It's easy to be confused about which user is currently signed in, even if you did create a new account you want to use for testing.

So FB should have an intermediary step that says: WARNING: you are setting this account to test mode. That will involve DELETING its links to 354 friends (list some of them), 23 pages (list some of them), 5 years worth of status updates, etc..

Or simply don't allow an account to be set to test mode if it has more than 2 friends or 5 status updates (etc... some reasonable test).

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