Some Facebook users are complaining that they are being banned from Facebook Chat for sending too many messages, when in fact they’ve sent few or no actual messages. The bug appears to be affecting Internet Explorer users.
Dozens of other problems are being reported with chat as well, but this particular issue seems sort of ridiculous. Only your Facebook friends are on your chat list, so even the fact that the error exists is odd. Is there really such a thing as sending too many messages to friends?
Update: Facebook has responded with the following: “Some Facebook users received a message in error that Chat was disabled for them due to a bug in the system. A team of engineers worked to resolve the situation and Facebook Chat should be restored for anyone affected. We appreciate the reports from our users that help us make improvements to the product and apologize for any temporary inconvenience.”
Hah! Poor sap internet explorer users …
No offense!
Currently there is no “invisible option” in facebook chat, so majority of users like to be offline. So those who trouble fairer sex too much gets banned i think, the great divide is here to stay forever.
i meant divide between girls and girl troublers
I use Firefox and I just got this message. Rather unfortunate since I live abroad and use facebook to talk to my friends.
I’d say that 400 messages over a day would be too much if you never get a reply. So would 100, or you know… about 5 if you never get a reply. Remember that this could be used to spam your friendslist which would be very tempting for some of the public figures on there.
You can’t send messages over chat without getting a reply. It’s never worked for me so it can’t be done. If a friend doesn’t want to chat, you can’t send to them using chat. It’s impossible.
If someone wanted to chat with me and I didn’t want to, all I have to do is close the chat box. I can also choose to appear offline.
Internet explorer users, you may suck on my lollipop or just upgrade to chrome/firefox already.
Chrome has issues with editing the news feed. Stick with Firefox.
Facebook’s auto-ban policies are waaaaayyy too flaky. I get that they want to reduce the amount of manpower required to moderate things such as people spamming others with messages, but really their algorithms need a better QA process before being rolled into the live site. You’ve outlined one issue, and recently there was a (still unexplained) incident where half of Tokyo’s foreign population suddenly got wiped off facebook (ok it wasn’t half the population, but a large number of friends who all live and work in Tokyo got their accounts banned – then days later re-instated – for no reason. we still don’t know why it happened).
Jean Snow posted about this:
http://jeansnow...ebook-ejection/
People still don’t understand that facebook is more digg in the way you CAN’T communicate your NETWORK and not gtalk or messenger. facebook is a tool just to open an account, use the application for publish what you want, and run away out.
Hei, is this IE 6.0 or 7.0 ?
Wow people still use internet explorer.
i know what idiots still use ie
Banning many people in this large social network site is unacceptable !
really feeling bad about it ………
“Wow people still use internet explorer.”
people still arguing about this?
get a life losers.
Could it be that these people had their computers hacked and used to send spam messages to their friends on Facebook?
A limit makes sense to me, especially when we’re seeing more and more people getting their accounts hacked and flooding their friends with spam.
Without one, a nasty bot/script/virus/whatever could make the site thoroughly unpleasant. On the flip side, it can’t be too harsh – otherwise they’ll get lots of false positives.
How could they still using IE at this time? It’s your own risk!
Perfect Sense, considering that spammers have recently been hijacking accounts and using Facebook Chat to send excessive spam messages to all users on the friend’s list, its a wonderful implementation by Facebook. Lets hope the bug gets resolved soon, eh?
I’ve actually had a similar message appear to me for posting a message to an event wall. I hadn’t posted any other messages that day.
A similar thing happened to me a few months back when I was managing an app. I would get 70-100 messages a day from users, so when I tried answering them all, Facebook would warn me that I was sending too much too fast…..This doesn’t make sense considering the users proactively messaged me first! I don’t see how simply replying back to a person (one reply each person, not more), is considered spamming.
Eventually, they blocked my account and I had to wait a few days (maybe a week?) to send messages again. I tried contacting FB and they simply sent me a stupid canned response about my complaint, completely disregarding what my complaint was actually even about. It was impossible getting a live human on the other end. They seriously need to work on their customer service with developers, it’s horrible. How do they expect to bring in developers and advertisers on FB if they don’t even know customer service 101? I guess I’ll have to spend 500k on advertising to get any decent help.
I think FB should think of some other measures as this seems very ineffective and annoying
My friend is on FB all day using IE7 with multiple chat sessions going. She has never, not once, been blocked, banned, or anything else.
As for IE7, for those confused, please check your logs for user-agent because I have yet to find ONE person that doesn’t have IE has the most frequent browser accessing their site. My friend is in real estate and she cannot access the MLS data using anything other than IE. I try to convince her to use FF3 for all her other web activity, but old habits die hard.
feature, not bug… aka the “Get Back to Friggin’ Work, You Moron” feature.
it’s interesting because Facebook must have the world’s best engineers and still have technical trouble…
FACEBOOK SUCKS
“Only your Facebook friends are on your chat list, so even the fact that the error exists is odd. Is there really such a thing as sending too many messages to friends?”
In Facebook’s opinion YES. I once got my account temporarily banned for sending messages via facebook’s mail feature within a short amount of period.
I was the “Historian” of an honors fraternity on my college campus and we had about 150 members, all who I am close to and facebook friends. I had a small canned message that was to the effect “Hey, If you have any other photos that you haven’t sent to me, can you email me so I can add them to the yearbook? Thanks.” This message was at the bottom of a more personal email I wrote for each individual person. I’m a fast typist so I facebook-mailed all 150 people in about 2 hours.
But because each email ended with the same paragraph, I was tagged as a “Spammer” by facebook, even though all 150 people responded to me, answered my questions etc, so it was quite obvious I was in deed a friend and none of the people I wrote to considered it “spam”.
I then had to converse with a facebook representative for two days to get my account back, and I was told not very kindly to not use Facebook as a means to communicate with my friends, as “That’s what an email or a phone call is for.”
btw, missed opportunity on the “Facebook Chat Nazis: NO CHAT FOR YOU!” headline.
This looks me a bug on FB part, not IE. FB just can’t handle IE, and when the problem occurs, they blame innocent users and block their accounts, – and send stupid emails. So better not to return messages:-)
Facebook. Whatever.
I am one of the victim too. very bad policy. They should launch a Chat Client.
The dirty little secret at Facebook is that they do not want you to communicate, they just want you to consume as much irrelevant advertisement as possible. Their restrictive policies to limit communication with friends on Facebook are simply appalling for a social network. So much for the grand mission of “helping you connect and share with the people in your life”.
Bah, I still use them… whatever.
OK, facebook has a bug. Moving on anyone?
If you guys are interested in communication tools, check out is a start-up called VingTalk from the Silicon Valley:
http://www.vingtalk.com/cpp
It’s still in beta, but VingTalk allows group and voice text messaging and features threaded messages.
I’ve seen a similar warning screen calling me a spammer, telling me not to spam, and that if I continue to spam, I’ll be banned.
For no reason. I update my status a couple of times a day I suppose, but I comment on someone’s wall maybe once a week.
It hasn’t happened in a while, but it’s confronting, because you think “I wasn’t doing anything? How do I know what not to continue doing to avoid being banned?”.
Anyway, do better Zuck.
I’m still getting these error messages today on Facebook. And when I scour the FB site to figure out how to contact them about it, guess what, there’s absolutely no way in. No contact us info, no nothing. Bad policy, and bad system.
hiiiyaaaa xx
The contact us link is at the bottom every page. Doh!
hiiiiyaaaaa
Hellooor (:
x x x
hii xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
am am a big fun of facebook,but whenever i log in i get the worning that “Chat is disabled on this Page” what is the problem,am using Firefox browser
hhahahahhahahahahahahahhahahaahhaa
I’ve had my chat disabled for a long time. It hasn’t bothered me much, since I don’t use it, and truthfully I just figured it was another lame Facebook bug. However, I started looking for help from FB about it and surprise surprise, there’s no way to contact them. I use Firefox and I have never gotten a warning from FB about chatting, so I am REALLY confused. No, Facebook, it’s not fixed.