Facebook Developers

Hi Yao,

My application is also currently not accessible.
What frustrates me is that I was given no warning.
They just turned off the application and sent an email.
I was given notice only 1 hour ago.
They should have given me a warning to turn off the ads by
a certain date.  But instead they just turned off the application.

It would have been a lot better if they did this Monday-Thursday.
Now my app may be in jeopardy until Monday.

It seems completely unfair that they would punish us
for something that an Ad Network is in control of.
And a simple solution to the problem could have been
to parse <fb:iframe> and search for the offending Ad Network.
Why punish the developers?

Man, I'm so frustrated right now.

This is totally unfair.. I'd understand a notice and even couple hours given to fix it. Shutting down an app doesn't make any sense.

Does that mean everybody should take down all ad networks to be safe?

Anyone can suggest a "safe" ad network?

Hi guys
We are working with several well known companies and are very worried about this
Do you know which are the offending companies ? we might shut them down inmediatly
Why doesn't Facebook certify ad serving companies ? that would build a much safer place for all of us to do business

anatolyl wrote:

mcsee wrote:

Hi guys
We are working with several well known companies and are very worried about this
Do you know which are the offending companies ? we might shut them down inmediatly
Why doesn't Facebook certify ad serving companies ? that would build a much safer place for all of us to do business

Per ad guidelines: ad networks that require user info to be passed to them (like uid, gender, birthday, etc) for better targeting violate ad guidelines. Storing cookies by ad networks is not allowed. Misleading ad content and misleading landing pages are not allowed (including landing pages which have facebook-like visual design).
Popups, popunders, etc not allowed even in the format of small notification divs.
Etc.

Per ad guidelines devs are responsible for ad units they host on their apps.

Great !
thank you for your answer
We deffinitively dont provide any user information (I think they can guess user:id since they are running in fb:frame but we do not provide our user data (neither we request them)
We can't control if they store cookies or not. is there anything we can do as developers to prevent them from doing that ?
We control ad contents at random to and have made suggestions in the past .. but we cannot control ALL the contents (since they are random and depend on the country). We have noticed almost all ad servers have ads with buttons very similar to FB's ones and we don't like them since they also mislead our users. We prefer branding ads instead. We we have no control on that.
What else can we do as developers ?

Montoya wrote:

Anatoly, aren't you a little late to the party? Those ads were dealt with months ago, when Facebook changed their policies and forced all the ad networks to stop taking that data. And they did change their tags, and all developers became compliant. As for what a landing page looks like, again, developers have no control over that!!!

+1

We have also never sent any ad networks any data.  It is impossible for a developer to monitor every ad that an ad network shows.  This attack was pointed at the wrong people!  Sure, the ad networks will lose a slight bit of revenue for a few days, but the apps that were brought down lose ALL of their revenue.  Get your act together Facebook and go after the right people.  If you don't want us using external ad networks, then create one for us by Facebook that we can guarantee won't cause our apps to be suspended for something we can't control.

Last edited by Davy Campano (2009-10-03 06:32:13)

anatolyl wrote:

Montoya wrote:

Anatoly, aren't you a little late to the party? Those ads were dealt with months ago, when Facebook changed their policies and forced all the ad networks to stop taking that data. And they did change their tags, and all developers became compliant.

This is simply not true.
Some ad networks did some changes and claimed they are compliant but they not.

The fact that facebook has not enforce new policies everywhere until now (except verification process) doesn't mean everyone is compliant.

Exactly!  I know of many ad networks that require you send your api and secret key or that you send gender, age, name and a few other information to make the ads more relevant.

At this point, Facebook should either have a list of approved ad networks, or provide its own ad network out to developers.

There is no such thing as a "safe" ad network. The only other option would be to not run banner ads at all.

Davy Campano wrote:

cyMall wrote:

anatolyl wrote:

This is simply not true.
Some ad networks did some changes and claimed they are compliant but they not.

The fact that facebook has not enforce new policies everywhere until now (except verification process) doesn't mean everyone is compliant.

Exactly!  I know of many ad networks that require you send your api and secret key or that you send gender, age, name and a few other information to make the ads more relevant.

So Facebook should drop the hammer on those ad networks.  The problem here is that there are apps that were suspended that weren't sending any data (mine included) and also were using supposedly trustworthy networks (I'm only using RockYou/SocialMedia).  They definitely didn't ban every app on the platform using either Social Media or RockYou.

Davy - I've heard relatively positive feedback about RockYou ads, but to my knowledge, SocialMedia is not a safe ad network.

This is not about violations. This is a political issue. Sending notices after hours on Friday and shutting down apps? It's more than obvious there is more behind it.

Facebook is doing it to small developers they don't really care about to teach everyone a lesson. One of the reasons is Facebook is working on their own ad network and it makes sense for them to kill external ad businesses. But I'm sure that's not the only reason.

Hey guys,

we've responded to facebook by shutting down any ads that have been directly reported to us as well as any ads that could possibly get our developers shut down.  It was as sudden for us as it was for all the developers, we didn't have any prior notice at all.  It definitely is a little underhanded that facebook suddenly clamps down on everyone in this space on a late friday.  Please respond directly to me (aaron@rockyou.com) if you have any questions, gripes, comments, etc.  We're trying to get this sorted out asap.

regards,
aaron
RockYou

Wow.  This is uncalled for and disconcerting as a developer.  If Facebook is shutting down apps with no warning it makes me reconsider whether I should be investing in advertising, content creation, etc.  It's stuff like this that will kill a platform.

Police the ad networks.  If an ad network isn't complying tell us so we can drop them.

My app wasn't shut down but if it had been you can be sure that I'd be filing a lawsuit first thing Monday morning.

Last edited by Yeldarb (2009-10-03 15:14:39)

I can understand why facebook targets developers for ads that violate their guidelines, they are the ones that put the ad into the app and are ultimately responsible.   The problem here is that the guidelines are extremely subjective.   Put these ads in front of 10 people and ask them if they are misleading, you are going to get different responses.  Just as developers are responsible for what goes into their app, Facebook is responsible for making clear guidelines and enforcing them in a reasonable manner.  Not only has this not been handled reasonably, but I believe it was done in a way to intentionally cause the most damage to developers.  Removing infringing ads is fairly easy and doesn't take much time, which is probably why they did this near the close of business on Friday.  You can't convince me that was merely a coincidence.

You could also make a good case for some of the ads that facebook runs themselves as being misleading according to their own guidelines.  In fact some of their own ads use outright lies.  On the whole they are a lot cleaner then third party ads, but that is merely a matter of degree.  If they are going to enforce subjective guidelines in such a harsh way for third party ads, they need to clean their own house first.

As it stands right now, running ads through any third party ad network is a risk.  When you put together this latest enforcement, and the vague guidelines given to developers by Facebook, no reasonable person can really know if Facebook is going to come down on them or not.

I do think Facebook should be aggressive in their enforcement, but it needs to be a fair process where a developer can be reasonably sure that their content is not violating the Facebook guidelines.  Until Facebook can define their guidelines better and put in place a more concrete system for verifying if an ad is in compliance, they need to take their finger off the trigger.