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Facebook Needs to Address Invite Spam
I'm starting to see a two cases of Facebook spam that Facebook will need to
address. This seems critical to me, since a very similar issue is one of the things
that's led me grow to hate MySpace over time.
First, I've been getting repeated friend invitations from people who are overly
aggressive business networkers. The kind of people who think quantity is as
important as quality when it comes to networking.
Second, I'm getting repeated invitations to join groups. In some cases, they're
groups where I've previously been a member but decided the group wasn't right
for me. After leaving, I'm apparently considered a prospect for joining the
group again, so the invites start coming in.
It seems like the friend request confirmation process needs a 3rd option beyond
confirm or ignore that allows users to block future requests. That would give me
the control I'm looking for to manage my relationships properly.
The group invite problem could be addressed when leaving groups. A checkbox
saying, "Been there. Done that." which creates a "not interested" status for a
specific group would clean this up nicely.
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2. Posted by: Someguy on August 1, 2007 9:44 PM:
I wish they would, I've gone as far a swearing to a Facebook SysOp to disallow people from sending me invites. They just laughed at my face...
3. Posted by: MArk on January 6, 2008 5:51 AM:
http://www.john-shane.com/stop_the_biyc_spam
spammin' to the extreme
4. Posted by: Mac Homer on June 4, 2009 8:02 PM:
Dear facebook,
I have discovered several severe holes in the site that should have been caught by
Quality Assurance, but somehow have slipped through and remain on the site.
These are not security holes, but holes that are liable to
slowly erode the face of facebook and dissolve confidence in the product by
many members and most hurtful, non-members.
In the invite feature of fb, I accidentally accepted the fb
feature to invite every single person that I have every emailed, CCed, or BCed
in my entire life from Gmail. (hmm, a warning message would have been nice,
once clicked, surely I would not have wanted to do that.)
Once clicked, I immediately realized my mistake. After the initial
embarrassment of inviting my whole world, I got over it as "oh well, my
mistake."
However, no daily email spam is sent out to these contacts, harassing
that they join! Many unpleasant folks have contacted me and are very irritated
at me and fb!
I found a way in fb to remove all of these accidental
invites, but it conveniently doesn't seem to work correctly.
The following process/path I used and the error that I was
confronted with:
facebook > friends > invite friends > View all
invitations > Select: Not Yet Joined
:: Popup Delete Entries? "Are you sure you want to delete these 100
entries from your Invitation History?" Delete
Oops!
"Something went wrong. We're working on getting this
fixed as soon as we can. You may be able to try again." OK
Could somebody else or a team of people, try hard to
improve this site with very simple enhancements?
Update: fb requires you delete these invites one by one. Deleted.
However, here it is a week later and the weekly fb spam has been sent
out to all of the formerly invited contacts again!!! What a joke!
Horrible business practice!!
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1. Posted by: Teresa Boardman on July 24, 2007 7:45 AM:
I had no idea I had so many friends until I joined face book. Some of the invites do come from people who know me or have heard of me. So many want to be my friend which is good I guess but I can't figure out who they are.