Earlier this year I removed the FB page for this project. Recently I have reinstated a page. But I kept up blogging on this blog and I intend to do so. I also have other web sites that I use to post content for this project. The reason I have multiple sites is that FB has proved itself not capable of supplanting or replacing all of these sites. FB has given me the most trouble out of all the sites I use for this project. Since I reinstated the FB page for NZ Rail Maps I have twice had Facebook require me to reauthenticate my account. There is no obvious reason for this occurring. It is possible that apps I am using which are forwarding posts from this blog to FB are being mistaken for malicious activity. This highlights the problem with dealing with a giant like FB: they aren’t resourced for good quality customer service and don’t care about a relative few people having problems with posting content on their pages.
Every time I think FB is a great platform to promote this project they keep letting me down. To put it bluntly they don’t want me using a blog or another site to forward content. They will pretend to work with third party sites whilst throwing up these bogus issues which is really an admission they will go behind your back to stop you from using an app to automatically forward content from another site.
So the page is going to get less content and will have additional people appointed to deal with any queries. I won’t be posting there so much. Instead I will be using all the additional sites like this blog, like Flickr, like Scribd, to post the site content. It won’t go on FB because there are all sorts of problems coming through from there. I’m not going to have some greedy global corporation dictating what I can do with compliant content that just happened to be auto forwarded from another site, using an API that Facebook claims to support, that they have flagged as “suspicious activity” because it wasn’t posted by me directly through the official Facebook site or an official Facebook app. It goes without saying I have not had problems with Flickr or Scribd or Blogger for the content of this project I put on there, even where apps are used; it is just Facebook with their born to rule mentality who believe they can make it harder for people to automatically forward content to their site.
My advice to anyone following this project is subscribe to the RSS feed from this site, or you can also use Feedburner to receive emails with updates, there is a form on the bottom of the site you can use for Feedburner.