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Comment by catshirt | Hacker News Reader

"Guys, the moderators are volunteers, and we have no power over any of Facebook's software (like the ban-bot) or their policies. We just delete spam on the forums, mostly. We do have a way of raising issues to the FB employees, and we have done so. Trouble is, they've been ignoring us (and everyone on the forums too) for weeks or months."

wow, that's pretty sad. and i thought they were only ignoring my problems.

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I can confirm this. Matt Trainer used to be an official presence on forums (developer liaison) but moved to a different part of the company. Since then no one has really stepped up to fill in his shoes.

To be honest though, the forums have never been a way to get in contact with Facebook Staff. The best recourse (which is actually pretty quick these days) is to file a bug report and have developers pile on support and votes. For example, I filed a single bug report last night and had it looked at by a Staff member and priority assigned in less than 12 hours.

I once had cause to attempt to seek help from Facebook on an issue we were having building something for senior Congressional leadership. They blew us off when we had leader's aides calling and asking for help. It boggles my mind how hostile FB is to people working with their platform.

The general consensus is that phone calls are for super urgent problems (server is down!) and/or paid phone support. Did your contract include paid phone support? I wonder how you would have been treated had you sent emails.

I believe that at one point they had leadership staff members literally going over to the office of FB's guy on the hill. Unfortunately I have no idea about the contracts, but given the cast of characters involved, I'd have thought it wouldn't have made a difference.

It was among the most appalling acts of customer service I've seen from a vendor in my career. They literally did not return our calls or emails and the project ended up cancelled.

Edit: this was ~13 months ago.

What disappoints me, really, is the attitude that's made its way over from other fields into tech: once you're at a certain scale, it is acceptable to provide no customer service whatsoever, even to paying customers.

Google and Paypal were the ones who started it in our industry, of course, but it certainly seems to be spreading.

We've had similar problems. We have a variety of apps running stuff like posting scores to profiles. Recently we've had some apps disabled by what looks like automated bots. We asked for an explanation every time and only got a few vague template answers and a link to the policies. A colleague of mine got banned from the developer app. He can't create new apps anymore and can't reach a Facebook employee to correct it.

Facebook loves being invisible.

I do get annoyed at some of the span that hits my feed, but really, it's facebook. If apps don't post, why would you put them on facebook?

It looks like facebook wants to get out of the whole platform game, and simple be an OpenID provider, message platform, and photo host.

They really do have an issue with communication. Unless you happen to know someone that works at facebook, you're pretty much left in the dark.

This is worrying. At least apps reject by Apple get an opportunity to reply & converse.

You're in the post-first-year quiet rejections, months between e-mail replies, and horrible uncertainties of iOS development period. Perhaps Facebook will get there one day too? :-)

Those are the results of Operation Developer Love: http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/417/ . Imagine what would happen without love ...

There's a post from yesterday which is more recent about the same operation: http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/516/

  30 bugs were reproducible and accepted (after duplicates removed)
  4 bugs were fixed (4 previously reported bugs)

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