Facebook has disabled ":) Photo Magic" (Former FBPhotoMagic)

Recently, Habré already talked about a related service for VKontakte. Nevertheless, the original version went far ahead of the Russian counterpart, gathering tens of thousands of unique active users daily and presenting new features, new masks and galleries.

The day before yesterday, late at night on CST, facebook, without announcing the reasons, without any warnings, deleted the application and all the photos of all users created by the application for all its existence.
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A letter asking you to explain the reasons for deleting the application is still unanswered.
About how everything happened, fragments of Facebook letters, and how to avoid such problems as far as possible under habrakat.

The first problems with facebook began on February 22, when a letter arrived at the general mailbox of the developers:

This is where your app appears.

Your app should: (1) express or imply any affiliation or relationship; (2) make derivative use of Facebook icons; (3) use the same name; (4) make use of Facebook trademarks.

The problem was required to be eliminated before February 23 (within 24 hours), otherwise facebook stated that it would disable our application.

After the correspondence with the support (which, to our surprise, answered very promptly), it became obvious that the Facebook guys were worried about the FB prefix in the name and logo. After a small rebranding, the application was renamed from "FBPhotoMagic" to ":) Photo Magic", all references to Facebook were removed, including any references to the words 'facebook', 'fb' in any contexts. From the screenshots all Facebook interface elements were removed excluding avatars. A message was added to each page of the application that ":) Photo Magic" has nothing to do with Facebook.

The next day, we received a new letter from Facebook, where we were thanked for promptly correcting the past problem, but also happily informed that a new problem had been found that must be urgently fixed before February 24:

Your app automatically posts a story story without knowledge or intent. Please note that there is no need for technical support. Posting a story on their behalf. (FPP IV.3) Please see for your reference.

After updating userpics, the application posted the following message on the user's wall: “I have updated my profile with :) Photo Magic”. In response, we added to the application interface a description of the text of the message to be published, as well as the checkbox, which disables sending a message to the wall. That is, the user sees the text of the message in advance, which will be sent, and, if desired, can turn off stream_publish if this message was not liked, or if the user simply does not want to litter his tape. In response, a message was received with thanks for the timely correction of problems.

March 29, more than a month after these events, I woke up to post the next update of the service, which completely changed the meaning of the resource and offered many interesting features for new Facebook credits. But, to my surprise, I found that Facebook gives an unknown error when trying to launch an application. I immediately went to the Facebook Developers' Center. When I tried to login, Facebook declared that my account was blocked and demanded restoration of access through account confirmation via SMS or a secret question. As it turned out later, Facebook demanded restoration of access from all users who have ever used our application. In Facebook Developers' Center I was in for a surprise - there was simply no application. It was neither blocked nor deleted from the App Directory. He simply did not exist. The first thought that came to mind: someone from other developers had to tear their heads off for an unreliable password or some other trouble, thanks to which the application was removed, since Facebook does not delete the application without warning.

An hour later, it turned out that all the photos created by this application for the entire time of its existence were also deleted, as well as all messages from the walls of all users, where the application was ever mentioned, were removed, which finally convinced us that this was the work of Facebook itself .

A letter asking to explain the reason for deleting the application has been unanswered for several days. When trying to make a phone call to the dev center, we constantly stumble upon an answering machine “nobody is home, leave a message”

Of course, it’s good that Facebook is fighting for developers to follow the rules and requirements. But the fact that the application can be turned off just like that, without warnings, when everything seems to have been officially fixed long before the incident, is not very happy. This fact has already forced us to rethink a little business management in social networks.