Facebook Slapped Me On The Wrist
Facebook is mad at me, or so it seems. I think they want me to take a timeout…
It seems that Facebook likes to put limitations on certain things. Earlier this week, I was accepting a few friend requests and requested a few friends when I received the “strike 1″ red alert message. It basically said “Stop! You are making friends too quickly!.” And then it rambled on about how I would get disabled for a few days if I kept going.
I suppose this started happening since I created this blog and have been meeting a lot of new people from around the world. I get a few friend requests everyday but nothing I would consider “too much.”
So this got me to thinking, why would a social network as big as Facebook have to apply such limitations. I mean, isn’t the point of a networking site to meet new people, regardless if you have actually met them in person? I have a lot of friends that I have never met in person but still talk to them often, does this mean they are not an actual friend? I think not.
I decided to do some research and see what I could bring up about these Facebook limitations that no one seems to actually know about until they get a warning.
I managed to find a ton of people complaining about the same types of messages. I even found a great article, “13 Reasons Your Facebook Account Will Be Disabled,” which talks about the common reasons peoples accounts get disabled.
Now some of these reasons I can agree with. For example, I can see why not using your real name might cause some suspician and get you banned from Facebook. But adding to many friends and poking too many people? Come on!
It turns out, they even have a friend limit of 5,000 people on Facebook. Once you hit the magic number of 5,000, people will recieve the “So and So already has too many friends” message when trying to add you. Yeah, I suppose 5,000 friends is plenty for most users of Facebook. But then again, my goal of this blog is to make myself famous, so I just might make 5,000 friends along the way…Ha Ha
The creators over at Myspace have set no limitations on things like friends, messages being sent, or how many people you can send things to. I think this is the way a social networking site should be. Why limit anyone from getting what they want out of a networking site?
So I am interested to see if this happens to a lot of other people. If it has already happened to you, please drop me a comment and let me know how it went.
Also, feel free to add me on Facebook, might as well go for “Strike 2″. I can’t wait to see what this red alert message will say. Maybe something along the lines of, “We weren’t kidding, there is a Facebook van outside your apartment and we are keeping our eyes on you!”
Click Here To Add MePosted on: March 12th, 2008
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I had the same thing happen, only mine was for joining to many groups. For some reason, 200 is the magic number you are allowed to join. I really don’t understand all the limitations, but then again, its Facebook.
I didn’t know they did this. Sounds a bit stupid. Maybe if we get enough people they will change it.
Perhaps its to stop those friend adder programs. That could easily be fixed though through those CAPCHAS or whatever they are called.
I didn’t even know they had a warning system, let alone that they warned you for “making too many friends.” That’s just ridiculous, in my opinion. You make them extra friends, and make them warn you again for being too popular!
Wow, Facebook surprises me yet again. I hope you continue to add and make as many friends as possible. You will have to keep us posted on what happens.
Yes, I am addled by the inanity of such restrictions. Even if your only object is to proliferate your friends roster with superficial or random contacts, then let that be the decision of the profile user. IF, this site is intended for adding your true friends or even casual acquaintances, then lets stop the foolish “search” engines for people via other networks. True, this is a viable method of locating lost (cough) friends; if they were true chums you would not have to do this. Seriously, this site offers the convenience of finding people you are somewhat concerned about, or genuinely do care for. But the networking feature contradicts the “limit” imposed on users by adding too many friends. It is intended on making friends by implementing this feature. If facebook is concerned about random and popularity augmenting of adding too many friends, then they should abdicate the “search”, “browse”, and “networking” options. Oh no!!! The true concept, and context, as I infer, of facebook is to display your real friends, meet new friends, inundate profile with silly pokes, glitter, personality quizzes, and enjoy the suspense of meeting random others without the hassle of filling your day with an exorbitant amount of attending every single social gathering known to man in order to create friendships or self promotion. I recently enlisted onto facebook and it, by far, is nowhere near the excitement as Myspace. Sure, it may offer a tad more class, due to the context from which it derived; school, work, etc. Plus potential employers, probation officers, etc. often, from what I ascertained, utilize this to spy on unsuspecting individuals. So it behooves people to remain discreet and cautious of what they say. I supposed I digressed from the issue at hand on a tangent. How about it should be of no concern in any fashion to the creators of this site of what people do as long as it, in no shape or form, violates the safety of anyone. How can I be able to make unsupervised contact, at least I think, with minors and be disallowed adding too many friends? At least they interdict the application of nudity here, as expected. However, I may be as salacious (lewd) as I feel I need to be during my introduction of myself. Do they not screen the content of your personal declaration? We may even disclose our phone number and address. I can conceive the friends limit may preclude cyberspace stalkers from employing “trojan horse” type methods of obtaining personal info. However, facebook can place a lets say five friend limit, and this still wouldn’t be sufficient in safeguarding from these nefarious characters. Maybe a more viable way of countering random, and sometimes unwanted requests, is to require somebody to enter the prospective friends’ information, e-mail add., last name, etc., prior to submitting a request. The privacy option provides the user of setting these options. So, what is the real purpose of limiting friends requests? Maybe this is a premonition of what maybe to come. Nothing is free and perhaps you may have to pay in order to be able to take advantage of the “real” intended purpose of facebook!
Thank you very much,your site is perfect.
Ah, help me! I JUST started facebook like 3 days ago and now they’ve disabled me. Is this a JOKE!? I mean, I’m completely new…and I just started adding friends and they said I had too many within one session? Eeeeek, now it’s been like a week, and I am getting NO response from Facebook! It took me forever to get it together, now they just take it from me. Urgh, WHAT DO I DO, I’ve e-mailed probably every e-mail address Facebook has gotten. I feel helpless, if anyone has any ideas…please e-mail me at m.manzur@umiami.edu Thanks!
Ya I totally just got banned from facebook for too many friend requests. It’s not my fault I’m uber popular. WTF. I emailed them, but I expect I’ll get no results.
Ive been an active member of facebook for a long time, i dont have too many friends, im not a member of more than 30 groups, i message friends i cant see and leave messgaes on walls.
Apprently this is spamming…. I recieved a warning and im amazed and gutted!
Does anyone have an email address that i can contact them on please… seeing as they dont have a ‘contact us’ thing on the actual site…
I joined, then got over, Facebook real quick. They need to learn from MySpace and go from there.
Seems to be around 50 – 80 friends is the limit per day.
adding 50-80 friends as a limit per day seems to correspond to my experience a few weekends ago. That is when I got my first “slow down you are about to hit a block” message.
I estimate I added about that number you cite, over the weekend.
But then I did slow down. I just added a few friends a day after that, and about on the third day, I got that message AGAIN. Now I have not added any more friends since then. I was meeting great people, it was really fun, and now I am uncertain if I add even one more friend, I might get blocked from adding friends, or even have my account disabled as I have read happens to people with facebook. The facebook men in black might get me !
I have friends on facebook with thousands of friends, way more than me. How did that happen? I think that 50-80 limit you are estimating triggers more than a daily limit.
It might even put a permanent scar on my account. I wrote them, but a week later, no response.
A colleague sent me this post… I had mentioned that I’m totally stressed out about my FaceBook/LinkedIn/Etc. accounts. Too many people.
She asked why. My answer – it’s like a challenge. I do actually know all 300+ people I’m attached to on FaceBook, and all 200+ on LinkedIn. But most people assume I’m a collector, and my insecurity flares.
I may just abandon ship…
Elisa DelBoniss latest blog post..Hostess with the Mostest
Even though you originally started this blog months ago, just wanted to pipe in with a : they are STILL doing it. I got a wrist slap yesterday because I added like 50 or so friends. Like you, my name is out there, and some of the things I am involved in – well, people see me and it’s not hard to find me on FB, so they are sending friend requests. I was ‘encouraged’ to send messages and not post so much, as well. Well, they obviously didn’t mean that OR they wouldn’t have removed my ability to message either.
I can’t do anything about it. Today alone, I’ve received 12 adds. LOL It’s going to suck REALLY bad if they ban me altogether. I think a few of the people I’ve added are spam bots in the way, their only goal is to have a ton of friends, and probably passed along my name now. What I want to know is: how come THEY aren’t banned?! I have no control anymore over this thing, so I’ll just ride it out.
Just to let you know i have been disabled but i sent an email to facebook and the reinstated me
Who did you send the email to? I got disabled after adding too many friends — and I knew each one!!! I’ve sent over 10 emails to FB politely asking to be reinstated and have had no response in two weeks.
Please join my Facebook Group for this cause!
1,000,000 strong to get rid of the current Facebook Limits and Blocks
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=40878112650
INVITE EVERYONE YOU CAN!
In my opinion, the limitation that facebook implemented is for discipline. After all it’s not about quantity but quality.
Yeah this has been around for a few years. Everytime I reactivate my account for new years and start adding people again. I managed to get around 80 people added in less than a few days. I get the message when I request to add too quickly. Might have to wait more than a day for it to cool down.
ADD ME……….http://www.facebook.com/pages/wwwMARZINOcom/58146569253
I AM SANDEEP SEKHON…I MA TEMPORALLY DISABLED BY FACEBOOK…..I AM NEW USER AND ADDING MY CLAASMATE AND NEW FRIENDS AROUND THE WORLD…HOW MUCH TIME WILL TAKE…
I hate Facebook, they’re so draconian.
I only added 30 new friends and the warning came up.
Maybe facebook cant’t handle the loads they are getting. I bet their system is overloading so they are limiting the number of friends you can have. I only have 300 total friends and have been getting the warning messages.
This happened to me as well. I haven’t heard anything back from them yet… grr.. >:[
I like to keep my Facebook more of a personal use to keep in touch with friends and family. I didn’t know they have a friend limit on it though. I believe Twitter is also doing the same thing to try to limit users you can follow. I know celebrities can easily have over 5,000 “friends”. It is messed up that Facebook only allows you to have certain amount of friends.
i got the same exact msg when can i start adding ppl again??? plz if some1 already experienced it reply to his soon plzzz i really need to kno
Same here.. i think its something to dfo with savin gmoney on server usage in facebook
I got a misbehaving and threading warning from facebook when I was trying to add friends. This is a world wide social network arena. If I refuse someones request to be added as friend or vice versa there is no misbehaving activity committed here. No need to be threaten. I hope facebook clean up their bull-shits.
I always thought Facebook was a social networking website? I guess after all that new applications became popular, I guess they became strict. Especially the rules about keeping your personal photos. They’re probably afraid of spammers. Cause I understand, because on Myspace, that’s load of spammers that try to add me. But the limitations is a very pretty dumb idea. I mean if you call your site a social networking website, don’t put limits on friend invitation.
Maybe the creator of Facebook really don’t have any REAL friends in real life. Probably a loner.
So what.
You’ve gotta think about the situation this way.So what,to be as “popular” as possible,you go around adding random people you don’t know.What makes you think that the people you’re adding want to have a person they don’t know adding them? On Facebook i only accept people i know,unless you send me a message stating why you’d like to add me…I mean Myspace is basically just to show off! if Facebook have a friends limitation and Myspace dont why not stick with myspace?.Facebook is a far more private social networking site, that everyone on your friends will find up what you get up too… now tell me would you like to have random people you dont know all up in your business?; i think not!.
Ok, between Mafia Wars (which awards you for getting 500 friends quickly), Yoville, Pirates and Vampire Wars, I’ve gotten the same friend request warning, and Mafia Wars is the only game I decided to play seriously. I will admit, I was adding a lot of people, and now I have stopped altogether. I understand people get banned and nobody’s happy about it. But my question is how many people have recieved this warning and NOT gotten banned, and how long did they have to stay underground. Do they warn you and they just ban you for logging in? I have erased all pending friend requests because I don’t want cause anymore problems. Any answers? Thx
Found some very good answers about how Facebook acts in these situations, what the auser can d to protect him/herself from being banned, how long the warnings continue, how to get in touch with FB if you get warnings/banned, and other good stuff. This is the only intelligent guide to dealing with the bolt of lightning that has seemed to strike us all without warning. Go to this link:
http://www.talesfromthe.net/blog/?p=28
K
They, quite rightly perhaps, find fault with accounts that are newly created and then explode in a flurry of friend adding and messaging, that reeks of spam bot. My account is perhaps a month old now and I add over 50 friends daily, no problems yet (fingers crossed). If they want that to stop happening then they need to ban those apps that encourage such proliferation in befriending. I see no problem getting that many friend requests however, if you do pimp your profile and get 200 friend requests, well, surely that up to you as the profile owner.
5 thousand are you sure thats not good enough
@paisel long post buddy ;0
I don’t see what the problem is. Since playing Mafia Wars I now have a reason to be on Facebook. There is only so much looking at pictures of the kiddies I can take. Since they started advertising you’d think that the more eyeballs they had on their ads the happier they’d be! Go figure!
Mafia Wars Strategy – 3 Tips For the Beginning Mafia Wars Player
Exactly. It’s weird that a social network would limit you on the amount of people you can connect with.
I had this problem today also. I added about a 100 people and got the alert. I can only imagine the reason they do this is the sites are unprepared for the volume of users they have been having…I dont know. But I agree.
I usually add friends whom I know or at least acquantances.
I didn’t know FB can limit the number of friends u can add.
Hehe I tot their goal is to get as many ppl connected as possible..
I’ve been adding 5 pages or 250 people a day and no one has told me anything. It might be because my site is used for networking not friends. If you just change your status to that you might be okay. Then again they might ban me soon, we’ll see.
I never really liked Facebook since I first started using it, they made many changes I don’t like, too many limitations like you said. When you report someone or something for anything. Facebook doesn’t do anything about it. What is weird is that I had an account awhile ago and for some dumb reason, it got disabled. I emailed them and I don’t think they emailed me back.
The only thing I like about it, is Farmville and CafeWorld (which also has unfair things about it too).
I do like the name Facebook, they picked a good name. If only I was really smart at creating a website. I could create a webpage that is a lot better then Facebook, a site that would crush Facebook like Godzilla.
I also don’t like that they have adult content on the site (mostly apps, about shagging, Yes, I prefer to say shagging).
I don’t like their search anymore, it was never fully accurate.
Also many other stuff too.
If I get disabled this time. I’m pretty sure I will leave it for good.
I just got a “You are a member of too many groups” message… and can’t join anymore! I was shocked! I was in 298
Today I sent 4 (FOUR) friend requests and got a warning that i was adding too many friends.
Think ill go outside and make friends instead .. it will be quicker.
I just got that from someone who had 5000 friends, but then later in the day I saw them having 5001 ?!?!? What’s the deal with that?
Thats what group and fan pages are for…
I don’t think Facebook profiles are meant for self-promotion. That’s what Facebook groups, fan pages, and Twitter are for. Facebook probably wants users to actually use Facebook to connect with friends; people they are close to.
http://www.newsy.com/videos/too-many-friends
There is a study in that story that says the human brain can only maintain 150 real connections. No one can honestly say they connect with more people than that. I think the 5,000 friend limit is far beyond what anyone would ever need.
Try adding FIVE –relatives — and getting a block. No “strike 1″ — just a block. I have 44 friends on my list.
I really wish there was a way to beat this
i got a warning saying i have too many friends.
and as you said you can have up to 5,000 friends.
I HAVE 602 FRIENDS. It also said i have joined too many fan pages.
and if i try and to “become a fan” of something or add someone, it says “Friend Limit reached. You cannot add anymore friends or more fan pages until you remove some first.”
and the last time i checked i had 2,889 fan pages, then i went to check how many fan pages i joined and all of a sudden it said i joined 1,445. like WTF. facebook deleted most of my fan pages !
i haven’t got any strikes or warnings that my facebook would be disabled or anything. just all of a sudden it did that.
and i was wondering if you could help with this…
i got blocked for adding new friends is there any way to enable my account again or does facebook have an administrator email
thanks in advance
They also block how many I.M’s you can send on their chat feature. Yes, I’ve been temporarily blocked from doing that before. :/
problems in adding friends or sending req to frnds its block so help me fast thxx
I DONT ADD MORE FRNDS SO HELP ME ITS BLOCK
I got friends in facebook more tan 100 per day and not got banned.
omfg its happening to me too, and it doesnt let me add no one or b a fan or anything, i thought someone is tryin to hack my facebook -_- wth shud i do??
i encountered the same problem, could anybody kindly tell me what to do and does this mean i can no longer add anymore friends?…what should i do so that i can add more friends in future?…thank you in advance!