"You will not collect users' content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission."
Seems writing a bot that automatically takes actions on a user's behalf would clearly violate the Facebook terms.
Banning bots is perfectly reasonable behaviour for any site, a badly written bot, especially one that's distributed to large numbers of users could very easily cause a denial-of-service attack because of sloppy programming.
Facebook probably should have just dropped the developer a friendly email rather than a letter from their lawyers and banning the developer might be going over-far, but there's nothing wrong with them wanting to ban the plugin.
>This is basically just a "We can, for any reason, at any time, ban you. Suck it up."
It probably had to do with his plugin enabling users to play Facebook games without actually playing them. I'm sure game creators want a human looking at the ads in (and next to) their games, so it's no wonder he was banned.
I can see why they'd want to ban browser plugins that affect their site.
I've seen a few people create things like this which can cause problems for the users, and support. Many people install plugins which affect specific sites, or greasemonkey scripts, and then don't understand what is coming from the actual site and what comes from the plugin. Then, when the site is updated, the plugin/scripts can cause unexpected errors and the users often blame the site, not the third party code they're running.
So, I think that actually plugins like this are irresponsible and I wouldn't want people creating them for anything I owned.
Just to be picky, wouldn't the users of the plugin be responsible for violating the tos? I'm sure he tests his plugin on facebook, so, bam. gone. but... shouldn't the 135,000 fans who (presumably) use his browser plugin be banned as well? They are clearly violating the tos.
Well, a ToS is not law, so there's no obligation to enforce it, so it's up to FB to decide, and I don't see what would they gain from that. They got the app gone, they don't really benefit from having 135000 more people hating them.
Is that true? I thought if a company made claims like that, they sort of had to do stuff about it. it seems like the dev could show, here's hundreds of thousands of other people doing exactly the same thing, why single him out? I think those tos claims are more use-it-or-lose-it kinds of rules.
Section 3.2:
"You will not collect users' content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission."
Seems writing a bot that automatically takes actions on a user's behalf would clearly violate the Facebook terms.
Banning bots is perfectly reasonable behaviour for any site, a badly written bot, especially one that's distributed to large numbers of users could very easily cause a denial-of-service attack because of sloppy programming.
Facebook probably should have just dropped the developer a friendly email rather than a letter from their lawyers and banning the developer might be going over-far, but there's nothing wrong with them wanting to ban the plugin.