On Fri, 2011-05-27 at 17:19 +0200, Andreas Jaeger wrote:
> On Sunday, May 22, 2011 06:04:58 AM Chuck Payne wrote:
> > {ATTENTION} Please pass this a long to your friends that this might effect/
> >
> >
> > Sorry for the cross post but I want to make sure everyone knows that
> > we will be updating the Facebook following openSUSE Group.
> >
> > http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=762429462#!/group.php?gid=2256834487
> >
> > Once we update to the new group format, all currently a member will
> > need to rejoin. We currently have over 5,500 members, and there is no
>
> Chuck, I'm confused.
>
> The page still says "This group is scheduled to be archived" - and I did not
> need to get re-added.
>
> So, is the group now converted to the new format or not?
>
> Andreas
Unfortunately, this is a big mess caused by Facebook themselves. Chuck
and I have both re-read several times what the message from Facebook
meant and the text is quite misleading. This email announcement was
unfortunately premature and misleading (fault of Facebook for putting in
vague text) because we cannot "re-join" but rather we can only join
somewhere else. Read more below...
Some time ago, Facebook introduced Pages (replacing the old Fan Pages)
and encouraged large organizations to move from Groups to Pages. Many,
including ourselves, chose to stick with Groups because of its
flexibility that Pages didn't offer. Facebook is now taking a
proactive strong-arm tactic to force those that should be on Pages to
move from Groups.
Therefore, as you re-read the text a few times you'll see its clear that
while Facebook says they'll archive you unless you upgrade to the new
Groups format, they are not allowing everyone to do that, including
openSUSE. Therefore, there will be no new Group for Facebook for
openSUSE, however we can choose to maintain the old group in its
archived fashion. Simply put, Facebook rejects our Group because we are
too large.
To further add to this problem, we already have two openSUSE Pages that
exist. Our Group has 5800 members. Our administrated Page has 2,200
Likes (members) and the other "openSuse" page that we don't administer
(and no way to figure out who does) has 3,300 likes.
Facebook does not offer any method to merge all three instances together
into one unified Page. Furthermore, migrating from Group to Page (which
is our only option) will force 5,800 members to re-join under the Page
(a new URL). Others who have migrated from Groups to the new Page
format have complained in the past that this resulted in an average of
60% loss of membership. That's a huge potential loss for those of us
using Facebook to promote openSUSE.
To make matters worse, we could assert our trademark rights to get the
other Page over to us, but Facebook according to their documentation,
will simply shut down that page. That will shut out 3,300 supporters of
openSUSE who didn't know they were on the wrong Page to begin with. The
math adds up to potential disaster here.
I'm working on reaching out to Facebook to hopefully get them to offer
some kind of backdoor solution that won't result in a harmful loss for
us. But I need to think and choose my words carefully so their actions
based on their existing strong arm policies don't adversely harm us.
Bryen
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