My Blog

I haven't blogged in a little while.  I've been working on rails projects for The Odin Project.  The current one is a "Facebook clone".  It doesn't have to look exactly like facebook, but it should have the basic functions such as likes, friends, friend requests, posts and comments, as well as full login functions, including omniauth login from facebook (You know, those "login with facebook" buttons).  So, I go to the meta developer website and look at instructions.  I'll have to register my app and get an ID and a secret key to do this.  Great.  Time to register and get this done.  I'm already logged in to facebook on this computer, so it recognizes me.  This should be easy.  It asks me to enter my email, but then gives an error

Umm, yeah that email is already confirmed, that should be great, right?  nope.  So, I give it a different email and have the code sent. 

Normally I wouldn't share a login code like this, but I'm willing to because it doesn't work.

I can't figure out what is going wrong here, so I try it again, and again, and again.  You can see the other emails from facebook to the left of the email above.  Here's the thing... They ALL have the same code in them 46453.  There is definitely something broken about this.  It should be a unique code every time, and it should work as long as I type it correctly.  It would seem someone substituted a hard coded number instead of the actual code generator.

So, I try to find a way to contact meta to let them know their developer portal is broken, so that they can fix it, and I can get on with this project.  I can't find any sort of contact form or email on their website.  Ok, I'll submit a bug report.  Nope, have to be logged in to do that.  Ok, I'll go on their discussion board and post there... Nope, have to be logged in to do that.  I click on the support tab.  It's just a search function.  No chat options.  No way to send a message.  

At this point I was pretty frustrated and had been working at this for a while.  I elect to step away from it and work on omniauth from github instead.  I planned to have both anyway.  So, I did that, learned some stuff and wrapped up for the day.  Dinner, sleep, etc.  At 6AM I sat straight up when I realized that this was most likely not a case of incompetence at Meta.  This was likely sabotage.  They just had layoffs and someone probably did this on their way out the door.  It was pretty sneaky too.  It would be hard for Meta to notice it until someone look at some quarterly metrics and realized that no new developers had signed up with them in the past couple of months.  Nobody who's already signed up would be affected, and anybody not already signed up has no way of contacting Meta to let them know about the problem.  

That's part of the motivation for writing this blog post.  I plan to put it on facebook and hope that one of their content reviewers notices it and passes the information along so that I can finish the project properly.  If anyone reading this knows someone currently at Meta, please pass it along.  Thanks.  

Edit:  It has now been a month and I just tried to signup again.  They sent me the same 46453 code in my email to "confirm" the new email.  I think I will try creating a new email just to see what happens.  However, as far as I know, no new developers have been able to sign up with meta for at least a month.  I'm pretty astonished by this situation.  In my next experiment I will go so far as to sign up in an incognito window and see what that does.  

Edit2:  It has been over 2 months and it's still the same.