All around the world, thousands, no tens of thousands of facebook users are being banned and suspended on a weekly basis. If you hear a long howl of terrible loneliness and you know there are no wolves in your area, look for a desperate facebook soul who has just had their account either suspended or banned.



To a lot of people this is really a non-issue, much to do about nothing. But to the 100 Million who inhabit the fastest growing social network and the several tens of millions who now spend more time inside facebook than around the rest of the internet, this is quite a serious topic. You volunteer to send out 400 invitations to your facebook friends on behalf of your boss and your boss smiles and you hear him say, wow Jim is a real go getter. You can banned after sending only 60 messages and yo partner, your now in trouble...

So, if you just got suspended while doing someone else a favor, and you are sitting around reading this article and wondering if your suspension might get released tomorrow. Dream on. Same for if you ignored the warning suspension messages and went direct to a facebook ban. Those invitations didn't go out and you know you are in a pile of deep do do. Look around the front page of facebook, the address is there for dispute resolution. Get a message to them right away, but don't hold your breath while doing this.

And let us not forget that commercial class of people feeling deep busines angst over having lost their list of 3-4000 prospects. Sometimes these are the mom and pop type companies who have decided to use facebook for marketing and sometimes these are sizable mid-sized corporations getting overly aggressive with their grassroots marketing or surveying. In any case, the loss of the profile also means no contact with the prospective customer base.

Because of how low key that warning message is, a busy user can click right on through that most important of stop signs. And in that article, I covered how easy this was to do too.

Ignorance of the Law is no excuse and in the case of Facebook, a faceless engine in the background deems certain activity looks like spam according to their filters and suddenly you are out of there. But here is some detail on activities that you should NOT do, so as to stay out of trouble with Facebook.

Nudity. Is it art or pornography? Want to test the fine line? Well, if you want to Facebook is a great place to rationalize this sort of thing. If they deem that picture of your ex was not **Art** then art you go, my friend. Yeah, I wouldn't suggest you test them in this regard with anything less than a well recognized international art piece - lets say something of the stature of a "Mona Lisa"

Oddly enough, writing to too many people before they accept you as a friend - looks like spam.

Writing too many times in a short period of time on group walls. Stay under 30 per day and don't test that number to seriously.

Using images without permission - you are asked about this.

Using facebook's email facility as if it were IM or MSN or Yahoo chat. Odd that on a social network you can get banned for that, but there you go. Facebook has a chat facility and they would rather you use that rather than abuse the email in that way.

Promotion of racism, hate mail or any of the regular sort of utterances that would have gotten you in trouble outside of facebook too. People engaging in this thing shouldn't be surprised if their accounts are permanently suspended.

We see two forms of general problems that people fall prey to just before getting banned or suspended.

One of them, which includes posting obvious unartistic nude pictures and hacking etc., is a pretty blatant activity on the part of the user and the reasons for getting banned are obvious enough.

Generally, it would appear that there are two classes of evil that can get one banned or suspended from facebook. Nudity and stealing images and other such types of activity is one class of activity.

a time based limit that has been exceeded such as inviting two hundred strangers to be your friend in a week which is allowed, but not if done in 30 minutes.

If however you are reading this after having gotten suspended or banned, there is a resolution email on the site that you can attempt to plead your case to.