Facebook Developers

Thomas Boutell wrote:

The solution: stop passing back the ids array after the invitation is complete. App authors will have to adjust to the fact that they can't tell whether users actually invited anyone and ***therefore*** can't force users to do so.

I don't understand how the end conclusion was made from the assumption?

Thats a bad idea... It's important to be able to track who invited who, in fact many apps need that to associate credits.   Users will eventually get bored of the force invite apps and they will die.  Don't think that because you see a popular app with force invites that its because of the force invites, it's simply because users like the app... get a clue and stop whining.

DMS wrote:

Thats a bad idea... It's important to be able to track who invited who, in fact many apps need that to associate credits.   Users will eventually get bored of the force invite apps and they will die.

Pass your "who invited who" information in the destination link for users who accept the app. You do not need the ids at the time of invite to implement the feature you want.

Darxider wrote:

Thomas Boutell wrote:

The solution: stop passing back the ids array after the invitation is complete. App authors will have to adjust to the fact that they can't tell whether users actually invited anyone and ***therefore*** can't force users to do so.

I don't understand how the end conclusion was made from the assumption?

The problem: an app author can force users to invite other people before they are allowed to use the app.

The solution: don't tell the app author whether the user actually invited anybody, and remind the user that the app author won't be told. Now the app author has lost his leverage and will have to rely on giving people a better reason to invite their friends.

chrisclaydon wrote:

The solution, and the only solution is to either PERMANENTLY SHUT DOWN all the apps who do this, OR at the very least permanently ban them from sending any invites, OR make a statement saying its OK to force invites and remove the skip button from the screen so we can all start doing it. A level playing field is needed. At the moment, my genuine applications are suffering from unfair competition because copycat applications are using forced invites and I'm not.

Unless facebook take action in the next few days, I will have no choice but to start using forced invites too, which I really don't want to do, but by failing to take action on this, Facebook are forcing me into it.

Monitoring thousands of deployed apps for signs of this behavior is impractical, which is why I am proposing a technical fix that makes it impossible.

DMS wrote:

Thomas Boutell wrote:

DMS wrote:

Thats a bad idea... It's important to be able to track who invited who, in fact many apps need that to associate credits.   Users will eventually get bored of the force invite apps and they will die.

Pass your "who invited who" information in the destination link for users who accept the app. You do not need the ids at the time of invite to implement the feature you want.

You would need it to track performance... To determine sign up rate

Who cares what the rate of sent invitations is? The rate of accepted invitations is more important to you anyway, and you can still track that. Anyway, as long as it's a level playing field, you won't have any stats problems your competition doesn't have.

fysh wrote:

zachallia wrote:

I think they are moving away from invites soon.. with the new "share with friends" on the about page... they may spice that up a little.

they just replaced the share button with that link..nothing new really

Right.. but it is phrased differently.

Thomas Boutell wrote:

Darxider wrote:

I don't understand how the end conclusion was made from the assumption?

The problem: an app author can force users to invite other people before they are allowed to use the app.

The solution: don't tell the app author whether the user actually invited anybody, and remind the user that the app author won't be told. Now the app author has lost his leverage and will have to rely on giving people a better reason to invite their friends.

Thomas, I'm not sure what leverage you're talking about. App authors do this to gain more users. They're merely tweaking the process such that propagation is driven by the convenience given to a lazy user who wants to invite their friends because they don't want to think "why am I supposed to do it right NOW?" rather than by fans who are genuinely adopting the app.

Not returning the ids is just an inconvenience for a certain class of apps that use "requests" as a means of communication with non-app users, rather than for the class of apps that use "invites" before presenting actual functionality.

This idea observes the problem, but fixes the wrong organ.

Facebook has already deployed a "user review" process last night (check the "About" page of your apps). I think they're on the right track. They should do the same with the invite page.

Last edited by Darxider (2008-01-24 11:23:35)

The solution lies deep somewhere in the abyss.... Make invites meaningless and you solve the problem. How do you do this Phillip? Glad you asked. Create another way for users to discover apps!

luke wrote:

That's a daft solution.  Some apps actually use those IDs to stop the same people being sent multiple invites.

Your solution also doesn't tackle the issue of apps that simply hide the skip/cancel buttons.

Better solutions:

1) Make it harder to hide the skip/cancel buttons

2) Only display an invite page to a user once every hour (per app).  If an app redirects a user back to the invite page, the FBML tag would render a message saying "To prevent Applications abusing the invite system, you will need to come back in an hour's time if you want to invite any friends" - I think that would kill it off pretty quickly.

3) I like you idea of having it always say "Invites are optional, you do not have to invite any friends"

I like #2.

Unfortunately, the continued abuse of this feature means that it is one day a possibility that we will lose it. Just look at Facebook's recent change in removing passive news feeds.

There are several measures that Facebook can do without breaking apps such as #2 above; ban the practice and clearly define it in the TOS; and even throw in #3 above with report link. Have a window pop-up on invites saying "WARNING - You're about to send invites to...".

Darxider wrote:

Thomas, I'm not sure what leverage you're talking about. App authors do this to gain more users. They're merely tweaking the process such that propagation is driven by the convenience given to a lazy user who wants to invite their friends because they don't want to think "why am I supposed to do it right NOW?" rather than by fans who are genuinely adopting the app.

Many apps are saying "you HAVE TO invite friends before you can do X, Y and Z." The fix I'm proposing would solve that, partly because the app authors would have no way of punishing the user for not doing so, and partly because it would display a clear message from Facebook saying that you do NOT have to invite your friends.

It is true that some apps just say "hey, invite your friends!" ridiculously early in the process and don't actually threaten to withhold features. But the "this is optional, you do not have to invite your friends" message in the actual dialog would help here too.

Darxider wrote:

Facebook has already deployed a "user review" process last night (check the "About" page of your apps). I think they're on the right track. They should do the same with the invite page.

That's a good idea too. There are a lot of clueful Facebook users out there who could help watch out for the less clueful. There would be occasional false positives and mean-spirited negative ratings, though, so there would always have to be human review. Technical fixes like mine could cut down on the number of problems that have to be human-reviewed.

Thomas Boutell wrote:

luke wrote:

2) Only display an invite page to a user once every hour (per app).  If an app redirects a user back to the invite page, the FBML tag would render a message saying "To prevent Applications abusing the invite system, you will need to come back in an hour's time if you want to invite any friends" - I think that would kill it off pretty quickly.

As I understand it the main problem is apps that require you to send some invites before you can "really use" the app for the first time. So making them wait an hour before they do it again wouldn't help much. Also apps are already limited to 20 invites per user per day, so the hour thing wouldn't make much of a difference.

I think he means that users would be unlikely to come back in an hour and just uninstall instead. The app would then not use the practice if it's not effective. 

Good deterrent but not a solution as an app could write some convincing text to get the user to invite before skipping.