Facebook Problems

Yes we are having problems with "Facebook".



We have worked with - taught classes - brought in teaching materials - brought in Teachers - provided our professional opinion and generally supported, sponsored and promoted the ESL Cafe at St Paul's Bloor Street in Toronto Canada for the last seven years.



The ESL Cafe has provided a free, safe and educational experience for over 3,000 paticipants over the last seven years.



We have always strived to provide an excellent free, educational service that is of genuine benefit to the community and is a service that our volunteers can take pride in the results of their efforts and time with the ESL cafe participants.



The numbers of ESL Cafe participants has grown from 20 each week to almost 250 each week. We know the participants like our service and bring their family and friends.



We have used the ESL in Canada website and Twitter to promote the dates, times and locations of the FREE ESL Cafe Conversation classes.



To add the use of pictures and participant pictures - we thought lets use "FACEBOOK".



Following the facebook rules - we set up a personal id first: this is it:


http://www.facebook.com/ross.mcbride.140



When you go to this page - you will see me in class - the ID picture is me with a class - but FACEBOOK does not think that this is me and suspended this account. This is about problem 11 in a long series of problems with Facebook.



Facebook prompts you to load in your contacts and find your friends already in FACEBOOK.



So we allowed the FACEBOOK Friend Finder to upload the first 1500 contacts.



Facebook suspended our account - too many invites.



We did not do anything - this was the result of a Facebook application. If there were too many invites - this was the error of the facebook software - there should have been a limit - punishing us for a Facebook software problem is dis-honest and unfair.



After a week of suspension - we are live again - we get a questionaire - do we know why we were suspended? we answer "NO" - We ask for an explanation - Facebook never responded.



We went into our contacts list and found that about 700 contacts were loaded - almost a 1000 are missing and about 420 of the 700 not invited yet. We have 175 friends over the 7 days.



We use the facebook friend finder to invite the 420 who have yet to receive an invitation.



You guessed it - using the facebook software - we get suspended again. We get the same questionaire - this time we answer "Yes". Still never a Facebook response.



So we decide let's invite people one-by-one with the manual invite tool. We send out some single invites and now we have 220 friends.



We still have about 2500 who have not been invited - many have complained that they can not find the ESL Cafe class pictures and are not happy with us - Wonderful - we have our students angry at us because of Facebook problems. Here we are doing great services for the Toronto community and we are taking heat because of Facebook.



We decide to go into the Facebook account and delete all the contacts both invited and as yet un-invited and begin to manualy invite our ESL Cafe participants in groups of 10 to 30 invites.



You guessed it - using the facebook invite tool - we get suspended again. We have filed at least 6 reports to Facebook. Still no response.



This time Facebook claims that we have been PHISHED and our account is suspended.



SO we had our year-end and started our summer holidays. We could not post any of the class pictures. We could not post any of the fruit picking activity pictures. In fact we can not do anything with our so called Facebook account.



Based on our experience with Facebook we would not recommend it to any company or organization or interest group. The only complaints that our organization received over the last six months were because of facebook. We will be eliminating Facebook as soon as possible.



For the Google Map, pictures and directions to the Toronto ESL Cafe go to:

http://www.eslincanada.ca/free-english-class.html



For news and announcements on Twitter go to:

http://twitter.com/eslincanada



We have ESL Cafe pictures at Pinterest:

http://pinterest.com/eslincanada/esl-cafe-pictures



We will be expanding the Google Plus page for FREE Toronto English Classes:

https://plus.google.com/103752555324723748044



The first class after the summer break is September 9th, 2013. You can look for the news or announcements online - everywhere except facebook.