This is an open letter to other Twilight Site ops who use Facebook and anyone in general who uses Facebook fanpages. The recent changes to the Facebook fan pages ( they are currently an optional upgrade but eventually everyone will be upgraded to this new version on March 10) have two HUGE problems with them as far as we see and perhaps others depending on your point of view. If you are having issues like we are, Facebook needs to hear you! People who run not-for-profit sites, educational institutions sites, band sites, sites like ours are up in arms. You can see the post and complaints here that are roughly 2,500 and growing. Putting this under a cut because it’s a long one!
Fanpage Problem One:
Instead of having your posts be in chronological order, Facebook now thinks whatever posts have the most comments should rise to the top. So instead of seeing new news, you’re now going to be stuck seeing an almost year old post on say the Premiere of Eclipse, or a year-old giveaway post because those are the ones with the most comments. People go to Facebook because they want the new stuff. If they are really attached to an older item, they’ll bookmark it. Chronological order is what most fanpage site ops want, or at least the ability to choose if they want it. Hey if popular order works for a page, that’s terrific, but let it be an option that they choose and not a mandate.
Fanpage Problem Two
As a fan page operator, you used to be able to restrict who could do a wall post, now it’s tied to comment posting. This is great if you have a smaller fanpage but not a big one. The problem is that on larger fan pages you don’t want lots of people creating content on your wall. You love the comments on the posts you start, but you don’t want people starting their own posts. It leads to the chaos that KILLED the original MySpace Twilight group. No one could find anything because people would end up creating lots of duplicate topics because people weren’t patient enough to see a post on that area that was maybe 2 below. You then had people leaving the site/complaining to the mods because they were so frustrated at not being able to find anything. Then it got to the point where those guys just threw in the towel because their three person modteam was overwhelmed by deleting duplicate posts or off topic posts. Now picture yourself as a fan of the Lexicon facebook page. We try and keep it to maybe 6 posts a day. Can you imagine what would happen if everyone wrote on our wall or better yet if you follow the official Twilight Facebook fan page. What if everyone could post on their wall?! The second there was a controversial issue your friends feeds could easily become unmanageable. You’d never find anything. We need the OPTION to have these be two separate permissions. There has to be something in between no one but mods can post a thing and anybody can post everything.
One user on this 2500+ and growing complaint thread had some really practical advice on how to let Facebook hear you. We are quoting him below to make people aware. I lost the link to his actual comment, if anyone can find it let me know I want to credit him. I think his name was Don.
“URGENT! Facebook is scheduling a Webinar with their engineers on February 23rd to discuss the upgraded pages. They are obviously going to try to sell what they have done. Maybe they will seriously address posted comments. I don’t know but t…hat is not my point.
If they have that webinar, it means they are ready to set this in stone for full roll out to all pages in March. It’s now or never to get 1000’s of page administrators to send suggestions and bug reports to the upgraded pages reporter. Everyone on this thread needs to do this and reach out to every page administrator you know to do this.
The clock is ticking. You only have a few days to make something happen.
Submit suggestions here:
http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=ui_upgraded_pages
Submit bugs here:
http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=upgraded_pages_bug“
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