Facebook will punish you for helping people

Source: Uploaded by user via Stella on Pinterest

(Public Facebook status about this)

Be careful, if helping people on Facebook. You might find yourself blocked from posting public comments.

The other day, I was wondering why my pins were not appearing on the Facebook feed anymore (along with some game updates), and I decided to visit the Pinterest Page on Facebook. While there, I saw loads of people posting requests for Pinterest invites.

I remember waiting for a long time to get an invite, and now that I'm on Pinterest, I am totally loving it. So, I decided to help by inviting strangers as I'd already invited lots of people from my own contact list.

I started inviting people by email (as they'd posted their addresses), and after sending an invite, I posted a brief comment notifying them about it - for two reasons: to let the person know that an invite was on the way (so they could let me know if it never arrived), and to keep other Pinterest members from wasting invites by sending them to those who had already been invited.

Eventually, I had to quit as Facebook surprised me with a pop-up;

Public comments blocked

Sorry, you are blocked from leaving comments due to continued overuse of this feature.

I found it quite upsetting as there hadn't even been a warning or anything, and it wasn't as if I'd been spamming - all those people were asking for invites, I invited them, and posted a comment to announce it. There weren't even any links in my comments!

However, I thought that it would just be a temporary thing, maybe for 24h or so, and maybe on Pinterest page only.. But no.. I tried to post a comment on The Sims Social Page on Facebook, earlier on tonight, and I got the same pop-up! There's also no info/link attached, to let me know if I'm now blocked forever, or temporarily (for how long?), etc..

I am very unimpressed by Facebook. Clearly, they don't want people to help each other on their site.