Facebook wont fix group privacy settings

I’m posting this to see if there’s anyone out there that has come up with a work-around for this problem. Facebook, as per the norm, has been unresponsive to numerous bug requests, instead referring users to the same regurgitated page that has nothing to do with the problem.

Problem: Can’t Adjust Privacy of Facebook Groups

There are over 100 groups on Facebook I have to moderate, some with as few as 8 members, others with as many as 10,000. 

Facebook’s Response (as per their Help Center)

Facebook’s Group Privacy FAQ states “When you create a group, you can completely control its privacy. There are three different access levels.” That is followed by three paragraphs describing each of the three group types; Open, Closed, and Secret. Following that is a directive for small groups which states “If you’re an admin of a group with fewer than 250 people, learn how to change your group’s privacy setting.”

Considering most of our groups have over 2,000 this second option doesn’t apply. 

Reference:
Image of the Facebook privacy settings description:

Image of instructions on changing permissions for groups with less than 250 people:

Let’s assume I’ve read both of those thoroughly and have a fairly decent ability to follow instructions. 

It doesn’t work

This simply doesn’t work on all groups. To show you what I mean I’ll include some representative screen captures. Group names have been removed for obvious purposes.

Group 1: Over 9,000 members. 

 Group 2: Over 10,000 Members

 Group 3: Over 1,100 Members

Broken Privacy Settings:

The following screen capture shows the broken privacy settings for these groups. Since I have over x numbers of users in these groups, there is apparently no way to close the group. The group is marked as “open” though thankfully only admins are able to approve membership.

 Proper Group Privacy Settings:

The following image is from another group, which has only eight members. This shows what the privacy settings are SUPPOSED to look like to an administrator.

As you can see above, any moderator can change the group privacy from Open to Closed or Secret. In our case we want to sometimes do both. There are obvious errors in Facebook code that prevents moderators from being able to effectively moderate groups with large amounts of members. Examples of these technical bugs are:

• Moderators can’t view the “Photos” page of any group that has over 9,000 photos. This makes it impossible for an admin or moderator to be able to remove albums. Instead the group photo count keeps growing and there’s no way to stop it.
• Moderators sometimes can’t see members of a group, even though they aren’t blocked by the user. We have members who break the rules from time to time and none of the 15 moderators can even see them in the list of members, nor does any valid search protocol show them in the result. However, if I utilize a Chrome exploit to hack the page and replace the UID of a “good” person with the one I want to kick, I can then remove them properly. This indicates they were in the group after all, but failed to show up in the list.

One Response to “Facebook wont fix group privacy settings”

1. Michael Gibson says:

   March 1, 2012 at 4:10 am

   I’m very keen to see this issue resolves. Is there any helpdesk available to log a facebook problem.

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