Facebook Violation - Discourse Badges!?

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We’ve received a notice from Facebook, telling us we’ve violated their Terms & Conditions when using their social login feature. Specifically, they take issue with the Discourse badge system, so I wanted to share here and see if anyone else had come up against this, and if a potential solution exists?

Hi,

In working to create a great Platform experience for everyone, we ask developers to ensure the apps they build comply with our Platform Terms and Developer Policies. Your app londonbikers.com (AppId: xxxx) doesn’t comply with the following:

Developer Policy 3.2 - Encourage Proper Use

We found that your app includes forms of incentivization that are not allowed. Only incentivize a person to log into your App, enter a promotion on your App’s Page or on Instagram, check-in at a place, or to use Messenger or Instagram Messaging to communicate with your business. Do not incentivize users with other actions.

To resolve this issue, please revise your app. For more information regarding this rejection, please view our Developer Policies to see examples:

Developer Policy 3.2 - Documentation - Meta for Developers

For more information, visit:

Please make the requested changes by 2021-11-04 at 12:00 PST.

Let us know when you’ve updated your app by replying directly to this email.

We aim to provide reasonable periods of time to address violations we surface, but if you need more than the time provided above, please let us know by replying to this email. We will work with you to extend the time required to fix the violations if needed and wherever possible. Please note that extensions cannot be unbounded, so it is important that you act promptly to address the issues.

If we do not hear back from you, your app will be subject to enforcement. If you have outstanding questions, respond here and we’ll do our best to help.

Thanks,

Facebook Developer Operations Team

There’s not much information here, so I created an appeal, and got this:

This policy means that your app should not encourage the user to use Facebook integration in an in exchange for rewards on the app unless it is on the basis of referral. In the case of app id: 131542586870292, the app is encouraging the user to share and like in exchange for a badge (see attached)

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I’m a bit baffled by this, as I can’t see how anyone could interpret the badges as a reward for logging in with Facebook. The two are completely unconnected features.

So, either I find a way to convince them of this, or we’re going to have to drop Facebook login from the site, because clearly we’re not going to disable the badge system just to make it a bit easier for someone to sign-in. Of course we’d rather not drop Facebook login, it is a well used feature.

For transparency: we use SSO, not the built-in social login features of Discourse. Our IDP offers the social logins, but I don’t see this as fundamentally changing the issue at hand.

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the reviewer clearly interpreted the facebook policy 3.2 wrongly.

1st post badge is on discourse and has nothing to do with facebook.

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This has come up before:

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Thanks.

I’ve disabled the badges to do with sharing, as it’s hard to argue these are not an incentive for using the Facebook integration. I’ve contested the Like badges, as it seems that’s a mistake - they’re for Discourse likes, not Facebook likes.

Will share response when I get it.

4 Likes