Facebook has been fighting spam on all fronts. Whether it’s hackers and spammers trying to find loopholes in the site’s security, phish user data, or use other malicious techniques, or developers trying to cheat the platform, spam is a big problem. Just last week I posted about the Snowball Wars application which has since been banned. Today I stumbled across an application invite which asked me to install an application. The only problem was that thee of the links say ignore and one says confirm.
I’m not quite sure which invite works but developers using these tactics are making it more challenging for honest developers to succeed. Take for example Facebook’s policy of approving news feed story templates for applications and external sites. I submitted a news feed story over a week ago and have yet to receive approval on it. I can only imagine how long it’s taking for other developers.
I’ve included a picture of the Knighthood application invite but I have received a few others that have used similar tactics. In quickly going through and clicking “Ignore” next to all the application invites one automatically redirected me to an application before I had even realized that I clicked a false ignore button. There are still countless applications taking advantage of spam tactics and the developer forum has been buzzing about these apps for weeks.
Earlier this year Facebook shut down forced invites. Since then they also redesigned their site to make sure profiles weren’t becoming overly cluttered with applications. Despite all of Facebook’s attempts to prevent spam, it appears that they have simply curbed it. Many applications continue to slip through the cracks and it continues to be a fierce battle for Facebook.
Have you witnessed more application spam lately? How do you think Facebook can shut down spammy applications more effectively?
Im seeing more spam aswell lately.. Haven't been on facebook in the last few months though..
Comment by PetFoodz — December 16, 2008 @ 3:19 pm
Oh yes, application invite spam definitely continues. After the snowball spam, I've noticed two waves of similar spam: The first consisted of "honesty box" type of apps, and the second of Christmas-related stuff.
These apps don't bother to include the following things in their notifications:
- "ignore this request"
- "block this application"
- the exact name of the application and a link to their FB homepage
Personally, I never accept anything from apps that use this approach. I just hack the URLs in order to locate the app homepage and block it there right away.
I've been wondering, is there really no way available for Facebook to force the abo-mentioned user-friendly options to all notifications automatically?
Comment by Facebook User — December 18, 2008 @ 4:25 am
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!!
Comment by Mac Homer — June 4, 2009 @ 5:01 pm
Mac Homer and I are having the EXACT same issue and it’s costing me LOTS of time, money and frustration. I’ve spent over $50 (!!!) on unwanted text messages because of this ‘invite system’ which is just a giant sham. F Facebook.
Comment by l3it3r — June 29, 2009 @ 9:51 am