Okay, we’ve seen this happening to others but nothing could prepare us for this. Facebook has just informed us that someone (for obvious reasons we’re not sharing his/her name) reported our FB page for violating their rights. Which is laughable because we have not violated any rights whatsoever. But let’s take things from the beginning.

A couple of hours ago, while trying to log in to our FB account, we found a nice surprise. Someone – for no apparent reasons – reported our page and Facebook decided to suddenly remove or disable access to it. While the company did provide us with an email, we have not heard back from that someone as what was the story/image/whatever that triggered this violation.

This obviously is nothing new. A lot of gaming/tech blogs have faced such issues, something that shows the biggest weakness of Facebook. Therefore – and until our page has been restored – we strongly suggest following us on Twitter (you can find a link to it at the top right).

Still, it does make us wonder why that someone did not contact us? Hell, you can find our email at the top menu. Why that someone simply reported the FB page? Why haven’t we received a warning about this whole thing? For example, when Bethesda believed that we had violated its rights – about a story featuring a leaked video of Skyrim – it contacted us in the blink of an eye. Same thing happened with CD Projekt RED about a leaked video of The Witcher 3.

We’ve contacted both the person that reported our content and Facebook about this mess.

We’ll be sure to update the story with the responses we receive.

[UPDATE]

After further investigation, Dianne ManyRibs – the one who reported our page – is a member of DSO Clan. DSOGaming is not affiliated with DSO Clan. DSO Clan is abusing the system as the reported page is the official FB page of DSOGaming.com and not one of DSO Clan. This situation saddens us as we’ve been really open to the gaming community thus far. It also saddens us as there are still people around trying to ‘promote’ their pages by issuing false reports.

We’ve contacted both Dianne ManyRibs and Facebook and will keep you posted.

[UPDATE #2]

Facebook’s Community Operations, Xavier, has contacted us about this mess. Here is his response:

“When we receive a proper claim of intellectual property rights infringement, we promptly remove or disable access to the allegedly infringing content. Unfortunately, we will be unable to restore this content unless we receive a direct request from this party. If you believe that this claim has been made under false pretenses, we recommend that you contact a lawyer or your local law enforcement agency and discuss this issue with them.”

In short, Facebook did not investigate at all that report before accepting it and marking it as valid. Ironically, Facebook has not done its homework (or should we say they got bored and decided to pull the plug without investigating at all) as:

a) DSOGaming.com features a completely different content from DSO Clan. Moreover, DSOGaming is not affiliated in any way with DSO Clan.
b) The Facebook page of DSOGaming.com is not associated with the one of DSO Clan.
c) All content and images of the DSOGaming.com FB are not associated with DSO Clan, and are our intellectual properties.
d) All content and images of the DSOGaming Facebook page are different from those found in the DSO Clan Facebook page.
e) A different Facebook fan page has no right to take down other pages and it’s Facebook’s responsibility to investigate such reports before taking down pages.

The only downside of this is that some readers and modders may not be able to reach us (we strongly suggest using the contact email. There is a reason why we’ve included it at the top menu). Thankfully, more and more users are starting using Twitter so things will get better (for reaching us). We’ve replied to Xavier’s email and if FB does not restore our page, we may launch a new one.