Admin woes on Delphi Developer

For well over 10 years I have been running different interest groups on Facebook. While Delphi Developer is without a doubt the one that receives most attention from myself and my fellow moderators, I also run the Quartex Components group and lately, Amiga Disrupt. The latter dedicated to my favorite hobby, namely retro computing.

I have to say, it’s getting harder to operate these groups under the current Facebook regime. I applaud them for implementing a moral codex, that is both fair and good, but that also means that their code must be able to distinguish between random acts of hate and bullying, and moderator operations.

A couple of days ago I posted an update picture from Amibian.js. This is a picture of my vmware development platform, with pascal code, node.js and the HTML5 desktop running. You would  have be completely ignorant of technology to not recognize the picture as having to do with software development.

This picture was flagged as hateful, and was enough to get an admin’s account frozen for 30 days

Sadly facebook contains all sorts of people, and for some reason even grown men will get into strange, ideological debates about what constitutes retro-computing. In this case the user was a die-hard original-amiga fan, who on seeing my post about amibian.js went on a spectacular rant. Listing in alphabetical and chronological order, the depths of depravity that people have stooped to in implementing 68k as Javascript.

Well, I get 2-3 of these comments a week and the rules for the group is crystal clear: if you post comments like that, or comments that are racist, hateful or otherwise regarded as a provocative to the general group standard — you are given a single warning and then you are out.

So I gave him a warning that such comments are not welcome; He immediately came back with a even worse response – and that was the end of that.

But before I managed to kick the user, he reported a picture of Amibian as hateful. Again, we are talking about a screen-dump from VMWare with pascal code. No hate, no poor choice of images – nothing that would violate ordinary Facebook standards.

The result? Facebook has now frozen my account for 30 days (!)

Well I’m not even going to bother being upset, because this is not the first time. When people seem to willfully seek out conflict, only to use the FB’s reporting tools as weapons of revenge — well, there is not much I can do.

Anyways, Gunnar, Glenn, Peter and Dennis got you covered – and I’ll see you in a month. I think it’s time i contact FB in Oslo and establish separate management profiles.