You joke, but this is a real concern for me ... even if I do get a person replying here, presumably the hacker used dodgy means of getting access in the first place! how can I definitively prove what I'm saying is true?
My main hope is that it will be clear from the page's history that I've been involved from the very start, and the new "owner's" actions will look as suspicious to a real human as they do to me!
In the meantime, I've updated my blog to mention this discussion, proving at least the blog part of my ownership :)
I have nothing to gain from a PR stunt. As you can see from my website, it's a small blog, not a mainstream professional website. But it means a lot to me sentimentally, because it's something I have been working on for 11 years, and a small (well, 56k small) community of metalheads was built around it. The last few years the only content was the end of year lists, but this was very popular on Facebook.
I think the main reason it became valued among metalheads is because it's not a "mainstream" list, of the kind promoted by the music industry, every year the same people... I go to great lengths to find out great music. Often enough, a band which I think deserves to be on the top 20 list may be relatively unknown in mainstream media, and both the bands and fans seem to find value in this and thank me for it.
Check out the end-of-year list for 2021. You may find something you like. I particularly recommend the top ranked album on that list, Thy Catafalque!
As someone who works in reputation management, it was observed that there's very little incentive/value for the business to follow up on individual complaints with limited exposure - At best, resources will be spent with little return of value, at worst, the business may be dragged into a legal battle.
There is no "legacy FB page" to join as a participant. That's the problem. The hackers deleted the page.
I mentioned it to another poster here, but essentially I tried to inform my subscribers about the hack before the page was deleted, as part of a high-profile post (the end of year best metal albums post, which is the yearly highlight of the page, and always gets a lot of visibility).
Unfortunately, not many people seemed to notice or act on the 'hack' stuff in the post, even though the post itself did actually get a lot of votes and 'thank you' replies from bands. But only a handful of people subscribed to the 'backup' page that I mentioned in that post.
Unless I manage to get the page restored somehow, the best I can hope for is that next year, anyone who "actively" looks for the end of year list and notices the page is gone, might decide to google 'metalised', end up on my blog, see what happened, and subscribe to the backup page ... but that already feels like it would be too much effort for the average facebook user, even if they did get value from that community. To be honest, it's more like the commenter below says. If my Heavy Metal community A disappears overnight, chances are people will simply jump over to Heavy Metal community B rather than start looking for 'fediverse' stuff (I don't even know what that is, to be honest, and I doubt many of my subscribers would either).
> There is no "legacy FB page" to join as a participant. That's the problem. The hackers deleted the page...
Yeah, the lack of the page does hamper things greatly. I'm sorry again that this happened.
> ...To be honest, it's more like the commenter below says. If my Heavy Metal community A disappears overnight, chances are people will simply jump over to Heavy Metal community B rather than start looking for 'fediverse' stuff (I don't even know what that is, to be honest, and I doubt many of my subscribers would either)...
My hope for you is that you and your fellow community members can in fact continue - whether it is on something like Heavy Metal community B, etc. Obviously, your call if you are or not interested in researching other options like the fediverse...Although, you (and other community members) should start thinking of plans for what to do if another hacking incident happens. (I sincerely hope that this kind of thing does not happen to you and your community ever again.)
scammer PM'ed me, asking if I would sell, asked to get low level access to check audience, I know it was a scam but got really curious, because it was really low role access so I thought "what kind of damage can he do really" to myself.
It was small page so I went with it, granted role (I will not go into specifics for obvious reasons) and waited... as soon as he got the role, he (or maybe someone helping him) claimed my page from another account and confirmed with this newly granted role by me, quickly removed me and merged it into bigger page.
As I was looking at it I actually managed to click "Cancel" button several times when he was sending claims and made it as troublesome as possible but eh.
It is a loophole that Facebook has not closed yet, I tried to inform them but tools are really rare for that.
I'm fairly sure the way they managed to claim ownership in the first place was by 'claiming the page for their business', because no business account was associated with the page.
In my case there was no 'business manager' associated with the page because it was a community page. But it's not a stretch of the imagination to imagine there are many 'business' pages out there, which are still managed via a personal account only, and can be 'plucked away' from their owners by a scammer the same way!
I would have thought Facebook would at least have some sort of semi-automated "dispute" process for when someone claims your page at the very least!
Hi dmortin, I have no way of knowing for sure, but I think it was none of that.
I think they simply 'claimed' the page, and because it's was a community page with no 'business' associated with it in the account, they managed to use Facebook's automated 'claim this page for your business' processes to their advantage. Which obviously is a scam, but a hard one to contest when there's no human you can get hold of at Facebook to point it out.
My previous posts (see the older HN links on my post above) have some more details about the chronology of the "hack" (if that's even the right word for it) and how the scammers tried to capitalise on it.
Obviously I've changed all my passwords just in case though...
The problem with this is that, even though the Facebook Page was simply mirroring the content on the blog, most of the interactions with actual bands and fans was via the Facebook page, not the blog. I don't really know if the blogpage itself has the same readership; if anything it's the other way round: I'm worried that with the Facebook page gone, people won't know to find the blog. And with the page deleted, I have no visible way of informing my subscribers either.
I did create a 'backup' page on Facebook (here: https://www.facebook.com/Metalised-Life-112985154608128) and announced the hack to people on the 'main' page, but the main page was taken down before people subscribed to the backup. Annoyingly, this announcement was part of the same post announcing the 'best of 2021 metal albums', which got many upvotes and replies from the bands and fans involved, but it's almost as if nobody noticed the part about the hack and the 'backup' page in the post...
Reach out to bands who know you personally and ask them if they'll help spread the word about the new community. You can coordinate to do so on a particular date.
Reddit has a couple of popular metal subreddits, etc.
If there's a community that's going to hunt you down until they find the info they need in your ultraspecific, obscure, niche blog, it's metalheads.
Open a quick forum and work on it, build SEO articles, ask people to share articles on other pages, and grow your community double the one you had on FB instead of despairing and worrying about stupid upvotes. Best of luck
These reviews get cross-posted on the facebook page, and tend to be very popular, both by fans and featured bands alike.