Facebook Cranks Up the App-Spam Bot, Leading to Banned-App Surge

Facebook's app platform is one of its biggest assets, it enabled the site to provide a field for third-party developers to enhance Facebook, making it more appealing to its users. But with such a large user base, the platform is very appealing to those that would abuse it, as well. Given the number of applications in the platform, it's rather hard to police them all while striking a balance between user experience and developer freedom.

Last week Facebook altered the scale somewhat, by making its automatic app spam bot detector a lot more aggressive, resulting in a lot of applications being banned without prior warning or an explanation.

Developers are now happy about this, quite understandably, and, even if Facebook is only looking out for its users and even if it may have been right to label some of the banned apps as spam, it should have probably done a better job at communicating the change, or rather, do a job at communicating the change since there were no notifications whatsoever.

Facebook has acknowledged the move and said that it was due to a increase in user feedback, people marking messages and posts on their walls, made by apps installed by their friends, as spam.

Facebook's developers started taking into account these reports more than they used to, resulting in the spike of banned apps.

"Recently, we started getting a lot of user feedback, spiking significantly over the past week, on the amount of application spam people are seeing in their feeds and on their walls," Facebook told the AllFacebook blog in response to the surge in developer complaints.

"As a result, we turned on a new enforcement system yesterday that took user feedback much more heavily into account. This resulted in a number of applications with high negative user feedback being disabled or having certain features disabled," it explained.

"We’ve posted a link for developers where they can appeal if they feel they’ve been disabled in error. Also, we’re working on new analytics to help developers better monitor negative user feedback to prevent a spike like this in the future," Facebook suggested.