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Facebook Nukes 12th Largest Game Developer, Launches "Operation Developer Love"

 & David Murphy Freelancer

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Your virtual plans are dead; your diva live has been put into rehab; Dante is still stuck in Hell.

Such was the predicament created this Friday, when Facebook officially threw down the banhammer against game developer Lolapps—the twelfth-most popular developer on Facebook, reports Inside Social Games, with more than 14 million monthly active users accessing its titles.

Any attempts to pull up games like the Electronic Arts-blessed Dante's Inferno, or the Cryptic Studios-based Champions Online Facebook game, or even one of Lolapps' independent titles like Yakuza Lords, are now met with a simple "The page you requested was not found" error. And the only message from Facebook so far as to why Lolapps has been eradicated from the site is as follows: "We have disabled applications from LOLapps due to violations of our terms."

"Preliminary rumors we've heard suggest that the ban is real, and that LOLapps did not see it coming," writes Chris Morrison of Inside Social Games. "CEO Arjun Sethi declined to comment in response to an email sent yesterday, and hasn't provided any update since."

There's no irony lost in the fact that the massive ban came the same day that Facebook announced its "Operation Developer Love" campaign, an attempt to rebuild some of the strained communications between the platform and its publishers. According to Facebook director of developer relations Doug Purdy, developers have been clamoring for increased site reliability and more communications from Facebook.

In response, Purdy says that the site has tweaked its bug collecting mechanism to both "triage and track" errors reported within the site. Facebook now plans to post the details of its bug database each Friday so developers can get a glimpse into the back-end fixes happening on the site. As of Friday, reports Purdy, 12 reported bugs had been fixed over the past seven days—bringing the total bug count on Facebook's Bugzilla service to a (mere?) 4,514.

"We know bugs have been a frustrating part of Platform. We also know that our response has been slow (if at all). We are committed to changing that," wrote Purdy.

"We know we have a lot of work ahead of us. We need to regain your trust. This is just the first step," he added.

Facebook also plans to post a weekly Friday blog update in which the company will discuss site changes, bug statistics, and other topics that are of interest to the site's developer community.

About Our Expert

David Murphy

David Murphy

Freelancer

David Murphy got his first real taste of technology journalism when he arrived at PC Magazine as an intern in 2005. A three-month gig turned to six months, six months turned to occasional freelance assignments, and he later rejoined his tech-loving, mostly New York-based friends as one of PCMag.com's news contributors. For more tech tidbits from David Murphy, follow him on Facebook or Twitter (@thedavidmurphy).

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