Help!  It looks someone must have reported my account as sending "spam".  I do send a lot of reply emails for "report a problem" emails that come in from our 3 apps.   I also was sending out MySpace emails asking people to try our Pull Tabs game.  Likely that is what someone complained about, even thought really it's not much different than an app invite.  However, I would have been fine with just NOT sending out any of those emails if I had just been warned.  

Instead, my account (432663856) was deleted, and one of our apps (www.myspace.com/backstagepulltabs) has also had its account deleted it seems.  How do I get my account back?  The account was the "owner" developer of all of our MySpace apps, so now I can't administer our apps, and also "report a problem" from our apps doesn't work, since the account is gone.  And how do we get the www.myspace.com/backstagepulltabs account back, and the game activated again?

Thanks,

Greg Patrick

Backstage Technologies

Your account was deleted because you were using a bot or another method to send messages from this profile, which had sent over 10,000 messages. This is a clear violation of our TOU so this measure had to be taken.

thanks,

Joel

Hi, Joel.

Thanks for getting back to me. I apologize. Yes, I had been sending MySpace messages to MySpace users inviting them to try our MySpace game... I honestly didn't realize this was against the TOS. I was simply trying to grow our app by sending out a few hundred messages a day.

I understand that you would want to shut down a user profile that sends a huge amount of messages, especially if the messages are inappropriate or misleading.  It immediately stops the spam and doesn't affect anyone else negatively.  In this case, however, by shutting down the following two profiles, you are causing harm to our (and your) user community:

1) www.myspace.com/backstagepulltabs, which was the profile account for our game (app id 155930).  I'm not sure if the deletion of that account is what caused the app to be "gone", or whether the app was also shut down.  In any case, our 30,000 MySpace users are understandably quite upset.  Of those, we had about 8,000 playing daily. 

2) My profile account (432663856), which is also the "owner" developer for all of our MySpace games.  This means that we can't administer our other games, and that the MySpace "report a problem" link above our other games doesn't work anymore, so we can't provide proper support to the players of our other games.  It also means our other games can no longer display images in their activity posts, since all images were hosted on that account.

Again, I apologize for sending out those messages. I won't ever send any unsolicited MySpace messages anymore (other than the roughly 10 to 50 I was sending per day as replies to "report a problem" emails, but I'm assuming those are okay). I was assuming a few hundred messages a day would not be a problem, but clearly I was wrong.  But at this point I think it is really the players of our games that are being punished...  If you can restore the game and its profile, and my account, then a) we definitely won't send out any more MySpace messages, and b) we can get back to our business of building engaging games for the MySpace platform.

Sincerely,

Greg Patrick
Director of Engineering,
Backstage Technologies.

 hi,

We spoke to Alex Mendelev and he agreed that this kind of thing will not happen any longer. If you run into any technical issues, feel free to post them here.

 

thanks,

Joel

Hi Joel,

Yes, it definitely won't happen anymore.  Obviously the disabling of the app caused and is still causing our players a lot of stress, lots of angry emails, huge stress for me - pretty much ruined my Christmas, etc... We will never send MySpace messages about trying our game again.

I was forwarded an email from Ravi Krishnamurthy to Alex where Ravi said the app would be re-enabled, but that the person/people who do that were on vacation.  Are you able to re-enable it?  Two accounts need to be re-enabled to have the game back up, maintainable, and able to respond to customer service ("report a problem") messages: www.myspace.com/backstagepulltabs and www.myspace.com/432663856.

Thanks,

Greg

 

 Greg,

 I was informed that your app was restored. Let me know if you need anything else.

 

thanks,

Joel

 Hi Joel,

Yes, the app itself was restored yesterday afternoon, which is great.

However, there are still some major problems.

1.  We are still waiting for the profile account for the game (http://www.myspace.com/501612799) and the developer account that created the game and created all of our other games (http://www.myspace.com/432663856) to be re-enabled.

2.  Existing players can't get to the game.  It's like the game is only partially restored.  In their home and profile pages and in their "My Apps" page, Pull Tabs is displayed, but when they click it to play, it comes up with the install screen with the "Add App" link at the top.  When they click that link, they get a MySpace error that says "Oops, install failed. Please try again".  (If they REMOVE the app and then re-add it, the install works, but there is no way they would know to do that without just guessing).

3.  Once they are back playing the game, there is other evidence of the app only being partially restored for the existing players:  On the client side, through the OS 0.8 JavaScript API, getting "app friends" correctly returns all the friends that they had playing the game before the game was taken down.  But on the server side, using the REST 0.9 API, getting all their friends and finding the ones where "hasApp" is true, is returning only those friends that have removed and re-added the game.

Thanks,

Greg

 

 Greg,

This issue has been escalated and will be resolved soon. Sorry for the delay.

 

thanks,

Joel

 Greg,

I received word that these issues have now been fixed.

 

thanks,

Joel

Hi Joel,

Yes, almost everything is back now.  Thanks very much!  

The only things missing now are:

The application's profile account, http://www.myspace.com/501612799 (aliased as http://www.myspace.com/backstagepulltabs) is still not back.  

The application is missing from my Developer account.  Players are reporting that all the newsfeed story posts are failing with an error - I guess the templates are missing.  Hopefully these are both caused by the profile account not having been re-enabled yet, and they will just go away once the account is back.

Thanks,

Greg

Greg,

This issue has been re-escalated to our team and will be handled shortly.

 

thanks,

Joel

i have account before.but my account http://www.myspace.com/516619353 was deleted i just created this account less then 24 hours, and i use game only,but when i sign out and I try to login my account was deleted. I think did not do anything wrong.so I try to registered with the same email ID and user name..but I can not get back my account and also my games app. please help me. Thank You Best regards, Antony please re-activate my account

 Antony,

This might be related to your IP being in a blacklisted block of IP's due to prior abuse. I would need to know your IP address to verify this. Knowing your ISP would also be helpful.

 

thanks,

Joel

Hi Joel,

Getting closer and closer!  The only thing left is application's profile account, http://www.myspace.com/501612799 (aliased as http://www.myspace.com/backstagepulltabs) - it's still not back.  

I really appreciate all your help with this... I'm sure you guys are just as overwhelmed with work as we are!

Greg

Hi BSG,

Sorry for the delay, we shall get this rectified for you as soon as possible.

 

thanks,

Joel