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Is FB deliberately slowing deletes?

9 points by everslick ↗ HN
I try to clean up my FB profile, that means I delete everything I posted, commented, shared and liked. There are two tools that should be able to automate this, but both failed on me (i.e. 'Absterge' and 'Facebook Time Line Cleaner').

Additionally i have the feeling FB is making the delete function of posts deliberately slow, introducing a aproximatly 5 second delay on each mouse click.

Anybody have some tips? Scripts that work? Similar experiences?

7 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 22.8 ms ] thread
colept
It's possible your deletes are registered instantly, but the cache of information that serves those functions were not wiped until the existing cache expired five minutes later.
everslick
I'm not talking about deletes becoming "visible" on the timeline after a delay, I mean that the browser is completely blocked and unresponsive for 4-5 seconds (not minutes!). That makes deleting by hand lots of posts and likes a total PITA.
firebones
Could be, or could it be something that seethe user-agent and the influx of deletes from a tool as a denial of service and intentionally throttles responses?

Plausible deniability, right?

devnill
A couple of months ago my Twitter account was hacked by a spammer who subscribed me to a couple thousand other accounts. Since there is no mass unfollow feature, I wrote a quick and dirty javascript to kill everything on my page:

var a = $('.unfollow-text');for(var b=0;b<a.length;b++){a[b].click();}

everslick
yeah, something like that. facebook makes it quite hard to do that, because the delete is in a popup menue and even that is different from item to item. sometimes it's "delete" you have to click, sometimes it's "unlike" sometimes the best one can do is select "hidden from timeline" ...

for me it's quite clear: facebook does not want you to purge something, ever. if you dare to, you should suffer.

capitalsigma
I believe that there's an option you can use to automatically erase every trace of your profile.
everslick
yeah, but then of course you are gone completely. that's not what i want (for now). i want to keep my profile and friendlist. every other content should be purged.