Help! Reface.me flagged as abusive or spammy: How to help us out
Pieter posted in "News". 14 years, 2 months ago
As some of you have probably noticed, Facebook recently started to prohibit links to our site, meaning that for the time being you cannot share any of our articles or our main page on your wall or as a comment. Because the first appearance of this issue coincided with a referral to our site on the extremely popular Mashable blog a few weeks ago, we suspect that Facebook’s spam prevention systems falsely identified our site as “abusive or spammy” as soon as thousands of Mashable readers suddenly started to share it with their friends. Ever since, users get the following message:
Message failed – This message contains blocked content that has previously been flagged as abusive or spammy. Let us know if you think this is an error.
Obviously, this is an error and one that has a considerable, negative impact on the growth of our site. Another side effect is that people cannot like “Like” our pages on the site itself. Clicking the red “Error” link that appears everywhere shows the message that “This page has been disabled due to abuse reports.“
If you would like to take a minute to help us out, follow these simple instructions to request to have this block lifted from Facebook:
- Try to share our URL (http://reface.me) on Facebook, for instance as a status update, or in a comment.
- In the pop-up message that appears when you try to post the link, click the “Let us know” link and tell Facebook our site ain’t hurting a fly!
- Using the form, briefly tell them the type of content you are blocked from posting (eg. website, blog, or article), the URL (http://reface.me) and the reason why the block should be lifted (eg. harmless site, useful blog, no spam)
- Complete the captcha security check and hit “Submit”.
These steps literally take only a minute to complete. Thanks so much for your time and support! Oh, and if your name happens to be Caroline Ghiossi and you’re an associate on Facebook’s user operation team, can you pretty please just manually enable our site again?
UPDATE: Three months after being flagged, we were greenlighted again. Thanks for your help!
By the way, if you’re a fellow blogger or website owner experiencing the same problem, we have found that using an URL shortener like bit.ly allows you to spread your link as long as you disable the auto-retrieved content before submitting it. It’s an unelegant workaround, but at least you can still get your links out there pending your unblockage.