I need to hook up with anyone in the group that can answer a question or two
about Facebook. I am currently lining up individuals from facebook whose
listed surname is Puentes. I have started sending out messages inviting
these potential members of my family to do a comparison Y-DNA test.
My question regarding Facebook:
1) A long while back I got suspended for sending out Too Many message
invitations to the Vegan Podcast I started. Now being out of touch with FB
for awhile I don't know their current policy. Are you aware of how many
messages I can send per day to "non-friends" via copy and paste before I get
put on the "Watch" list for possible suspension of my privileges?
Your help is much appreciated as I'd like to send out some messages everyday
but want to stay a bit below the threshold of where FB's red flags start
appearing.
Thanks,
Joseph
Joseph Puentes
Puentes Y-DNA
I don't know the answer, but if you send a message to a non-friend, it won't go to their inbox but to a messages folder named "other". There will be no red icon to tell them they got mail, so they may not be aware of it. If you pay FB $1 or so, they will send the mail to the user's inbox and maybe they will have no problem with you sending as many as you want. I recently used this trick to contact 4-5 persons in Spain and in the end I was able to locate the place of origin of one of my ancestors.
Regards,
Victoriano Navarro
Puentes Y-DNA
Joseph,
I apologize for rarely contributing to the forum but I do use Facebook all
the time and do have a comment. There seems to be inconsistencies in how
Facebook chooses to implement their suspensions and warnings, so there may
be other factors they use. Both my friend and me have been suspended before
while others in our sorority were not for doing the exact same thing and
sending out the exact same number of messages with the same content. Some
of us were given warnings from Facebook saying that we were near our
messaging limit and others were not. Also, some were able to continue
messaging repeatedly after that, while, others were suspended and one was
banned from Facebook permanently. The person that was banned permanently
was actually the one that did the least amount of messaging in comparison.
But, her account was also the newest, so that may be one of the factors
too. In some cases it seemed like they took into consideration the number
of Facebook friends a person had and how frequently they used Facebook.
Basically, I would use caution and realize there's no uniformity in their
policy.
Ashlynn
An Idea
I have a little genealogy page in facebook, I am not expert but I think this would allow you to have more tools in order to reach more people without looking like a spam, your page can be done under your own account but will work separately, this is not a personal page, like a regular person, but more like a website where you exchange information, promote, announce, etc. This also would help you to keep that project separated from your personal stuff, then when you send invitations, they would look as a "site" more than a "person". I don't know the limit of messages but is better if you start to build your audience from the bottom up, slow, this would give you more credibility. Hope it helps.
RJ Quiralte