My New Facebook Rules

Hello Friends,

I am hoping you will read this as it will be how I interact on Facebook from now on and you might want to get a few tips.

I have no idea what the big picture is but I could make a few conjectures. However, I am going to leave that up to you and just tell you what happened.

Someone put me into what seemed like a totally benign, open group yesterday. It is an international group that supposedly had a good reputation. One person asked what was a simple question that no one was answering so I gave a really simple 2 line answer. It was, by-the-way, the correct answer.

Within minutes both I and the person who asked and unknown parties were being attacked in the group. Now whether they knew the person who asked the question, I don't know. I do know they did not know me from Adam. The attacks were quickly personal and I explained my experience, source of information and that it was up to anyone to either take it seriously, research it or toss it out but a little less ego would be a good thing. At no point in this 2 sentence answer did I attack, defame or even appear aggressive and you all know I can be. I wish I could access the answer for you but I can't because.....

I exited the group, not wanting to interact with these slightly crazy people ever again...I didn't say that. I just unjoined with no reason given. Considering the size of this group, I had doubted anyone would even notice my exit.

Within 10 minutes I could no longer like, comment or share ANYTHING on my personal or commercial pages. I have a totally private personal page and the same things applied. The ticker on the right hand sidebar disappeared next, then all my messages, friend requests and newsfeed comments. The only thing I was able to do was update my status, which would just sit there. When I tried to leave the page, it would ask if I was sure I wanted to do that before the status was published. I could stay there all night and nothing would happen but if I switched to my main page, there would be the update, published.

I would think the incidents were unrelated except for one thing. I could still manage to access my groups and pages and lo and behold, I was back in the group. If I ever manage, Facebook is trying to fix it, to get back on, I will block that group and be looking for anyone trying be my friend with connections to it.

I know as an administrator of my own groups, it is easy to become overwhelmed and just open the group to public membership when you start getting ten or more requests a day or hour and you just don't have time to inspect them all. That is human nature. That is also what someone expects you to do. Now they can insert all trolls and the next thing you know, you don't recognize your group and things like what just happened to me happen to you and your members. Sadly, there a lot of people on Facebook who have a lot of professional programming experience and because they are having a bad hour, day or life are willing to blame the cute kitty in the MEME with it and destroy all your work and pages for nothing more than a whim.

There is no one on Facebook who can safeguard your privacy except you. I have always left things open as I don't publish anything I don't expect to be on the front page of the newspaper today. I know there is no privacy.

However, I will exit all groups except a couple of Farmville groups when this is fixed. I will lock my pages down and you will no longer have access to a lot of things. The Friends that I know share the same religion and interests will be invited to my private page...everyone else is blocked.

I am simply too old to play games, except Farmville and Farm Town. Yes, I have a lifetime of information, experience and study which I have always given freely to anyone who asked as long as I wasn't going to screwed by it. Obviously, that day has gone.

I suggest everyone go through every group and page they no longer visit and remove it. As long as the connection to the group exists, the people in the group can connect to you. Then, start paying close attention to that little world next to the post button. Control who can see your posts. Go into your privacy settings and make certain no one can share your posts but you. That means in order to share the cute kitty picture you are probably going to have to go to the source to get it. It will be blocked at my end.

I would tell you what I think of this but it would violate several obscenity laws. This is the third time this has happened to me. The third time is charm.