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Facebook at Work spamblocks some SQL queries
- raitom 9y agoAutomated censorship is what pisses me off the most about messenger. I’m a old enough now to be able to privately share whatever I want to my friend. Yes Facebook, sometimes I want to purposely send a porn link to my friend!
- asah 9y ago"business version of Facebook" There's your first problem.
- Traubenfuchs 9y agoWho thought "business version of Facebook" was a good idea?
- isotopp 9y agoMy employer did. And while I was very extremely sceptical at first, I had to eat my hat on this. It's actually one of the best things for facilitation of enterprise cross-department communication and awareness that I have ever experienced in the last 33 years of my working life.
- nightcracker 9y agoCould you explain what features make it so good for your use case?
- isotopp 9y agoI could, but to actually understand you have to try out, because it's an experienced quality and not some a thing that is amenable to description. Before the corp FB instance we had Wikis, Email, Mailing Lists, Jabber and an internal "Youtube" like Video Store. It all sucked. With the FB instance, the awareness of what goes on in other parts of the company is much higher, the noise level is lower, communication is more timely and generally you feel less stressed out. Email numbers are down, mailing lists practically do not exist any more (except for machine communication such as commit messages), things organize neatly in FB groups, and you kind of automatically find the groups that are relevant to work. The Wiki hardly sees discussion any more, and is mostly documentation. There are a lot of problems in Workplace by Facebook, mostly in the messenger product (no spatial metaphor, i.e. no rooms, only groups, being the largest). But in general it has been an amazing improvement on what we had before.
- Twisell 9y agoMy boss is deseperately trying to convince me that my project wiki can painlessly be replaced by Microsoft Team (build upon share point). Yet this is utter bullshit every workaround he proposed to replace missing feature look like regressions that will make us spend more time on solving share point issue than on actually writing documentation. You seems satisfied with FB for business and you claimed it could advantageous replace multiple wikis. Can you develop your though cause from the outside it look like the same bullshit that salespersons will use to sell MS Team to gullible boss.
- krylon 9y ago> My boss is deseperately trying to convince me that my project wiki can painlessly be replaced by Microsoft Team (build upon share point). In my experience, the words "SharePoint" and "painless" do not exactly go well together.
- underwater 9y agoFacebook Work is a communication tool. It doesn’t replace your wiki. The only real affordable is Notes, which solves the “update email” case, but not evergreen documentation case. Facebook use Quip for wiki-like solution as well as some internal tools.
- Twisell 9y agoMy bad op mentioned that they kept wiki for doc. Read to fast sorry.
- dmitriid 9y agoExperience couldn't be more different for us. We also use the "Faceplace" as it has become "affectionately" known. Everyone just turns off the notifications on the freaking thing, so really important things are still sent out via email. It's corporate/business thing, right? And yet they kept the useless alrgorithmic feed. Just yesterday I couldn't find an important management post because it was buried below random crap from a dozen or so groups, and people, and events, and... Well, it also sends email for some (not all) notifications. The email preview contains a total of 6 words from the original text and forces you to go to the crap. Every single post including the really important ones are five lines of text with a "see more" link. Oh, and half of those texts are created as documents/notes (which are different from regular posts), reposted to half a dozen different groups that all show up in your timeline (nothing like seeing the same text 10 times I guess). And it continuously nags you to get their crap good-for-nothing Chat App (just look at the f*ing thing https://grumpy.website/post/0PSSXS3k8 https://grumpy.website/post/0PSSXS3k8). Facebook cannot even imagine that business needs of business clients are not driven by engagement numbers, or by MAUs, or by LTVs or by any metric that is relevant to Facebook. EDIT: Rephrased some sentences EDIT 2: Re: replies to my comments. "Oh, it's da bomb, only you need to <a list of multiple things to setup before it's even remotely useless>". Stockholm syndrome in full swing
- realusername 9y agoI've used Yammer before and it was mostly useless so I'm a bit skeptical as well.
- wwweston 9y agoFacebook, apparently. It's not exactly a terrible idea, either. Facebook is arguably a form of groupware, and so I could see its potential in a work environment...
- darklajid 9y agoCame here for that. I .. wasn't even aware that this exists, but that seems awful on so many levels? What FB 'features' do you need in a company? I thought Slack is the go-to for cat pics and birthday gifs?
- isotopp 9y agoSlack does not even scale to corporate size, instance sizes are too limited. Also, they have no corp sales plan to speak of. Finally, wrong kind of comms - chat is ephemeral, and messenger is only a small part of what is needed or corp facebook offers. And Slack is lacking the necessary controls for a corp environment.
- rootlocus 9y ago> Slack does not even scale to corporate size I don't understand what corporate size is. Care to give some numbers?
- isotopp 9y agoUpwards of 20.000 employees in my case here, with some serious variance and fluctuation because of the work being seasonal.
- johannes1234321 9y agoWe have ~50k active users in our corporate Slack.
- majewsky 9y ago> Slack does not even scale to corporate size, instance sizes are too limited. Also, they have no corp sales plan to speak of. Your information is outdated. Slack recently introduced an Enterprise product (on-premise AFAIK) where you can have multiple workspaces for each division, but auth is managed centrally and organization-wide channels can span across all workspaces. We're using it at SAP.
- drcross 9y agoDon't knock it until you try it. It's actually quite a good application of "social media" for a company because the domain is so specific.
- antihero 9y agoWhy on earth would you use Messenger for anything useful?
- slig 9y agoPeople are happy to post business details on a FB for Work (tm). Really makes one think that Zuck was never wrong on his assertion on why people people trust him.
- wink 9y agoIntroducing <FB for work or whatever tool> for internal communication and then not using it for internal communication kind of defeats the point then, doesn't it?
- slig 9y agoSure, my point was why use FB for internal communication in the first place. There are tools specifically made for that, and they are made by companies that respect their clients (the ones that pays the bills, instead of advertisers).
- Jedd 9y agoIn the late 1980s I fought simple profanity filters that wouldn't let you send the words wristwatch or Scunthorpe United. Impressive just how far we've come.
- chopin 9y agoclbuttic
- thallian 9y ago10 years ago at school I could not search for documentation about strings or "insert" clauses (sql) because that would trigger the firewall. Fun times.
- technion 9y agoIn 2017 I couldn't get a price on anything in the Cisco Select range because clicking the link triggered a WAF on the distributor's servers.
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y agoGently caress that!
- Gibbon1 9y agoMy GF worked on an mmo's tweens. Said one experiment with filters ended with a 12 you old boy writing, I'm going to stick my giraffe up your pink bunny.
- znpy 9y ago> On a business instance of Facebook it has literally no business to listen in, but does. What did he expect ?
- mediumdeviation 9y agoI have seen similar issues with overly aggressive parser in Messenger for Business, but with dates instead. It tried to turn the words in the following real conversations into dates for adding appointments * "Christmas" in "Merry Christmas, and have a nice day" * "at 100" in "It could be that you're not viewing the image at 100% zoom" * Four digit module codes from my university that looks like four digit military time and so on, ignoring context or even prefix/suffix text which makes it clear the text is not a date. It would be funny if these don't keep getting in the way when random words in conversation gets turned into links.
- yAnonymous 9y agoOn the other hand, it potentially punishes people for not putting spaces after punctuation. I say keep it like that.
- cup-of-tea 9y agoWhen it's 2018 and you're having trouble sending plain text over the network it might be worth stepping back for a second and asking: "have we regressed?"
- rootlocus 9y agoChat applications have mistakenly transformed code into emojis and links for as long as I remember. That isn't new. But facebook takes it to another level by blocking your messages because it doesn't like the urls.
- simias 9y agoFunny you'd mention that, the parent's post reminded me of my experience with Discord a while ago. I was trying to paste some code and basically nothing made it through unscathed because the chat kept interpreting the text in... interesting ways. IRC has its quirks but at least it's relatively easy to send arbitrary ASCII text.
- SXX 9y agoWhile Discord has many other limitations it's use Markdown so it's super easy to send little snippet of code using it.
- reificator 9y agoDiscord is (a subset of) markdown so you just use [`] to denote inline code and [```language-name] and [```] to denote code blocks.
- simias 9y agoI did not know that, thank you.
- cup-of-tea 9y agoYes, but that should be a configurable option on the client. Send me the damn text then let me decide if I want to look for URLs or substitute smileys for images.
- OrganicMSG 9y agoI have never heard of the business version of facebook before. Is it common anywhere?
- kalleboo 9y agoWhile it's fun to take potshots at using Facebook for work, this is also a clbuttic issue in stodgy corporate environments based on crap like Lotus with overzealous "anti-virus" and anti-profanity filters
- dijit 9y agoAlso known as the Scunthorpe problem[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
- didymospl 9y agoI quite often encoded code snippets sent on Skype with Base64 to avoid formatting until I found out eventually they support markdown syntax for preformatted text. I see it is also supported by Facebook at Work, maybe this would help here? https://www.facebook.com/help/work/541260132750354 https://www.facebook.com/help/work/541260132750354
- isotopp 9y ago``` for quoting code does not prevent the sd.date_of_delivery problem. It still urlifies, and the DNS parser tokenises wrongly.
- didymospl 9y agoThanks, I don't have access to Facebook at Work so I couldn't check it on my own. So apart from the lack of control over URLification in normal messages that the author rightly pointed out, it seems they also have a bug in the noformat feature.
- rootlocus 9y agoThat sounds like a bug rather than a feature.
- madshiva 9y agoAs a user, that use facebook. Facepalm.
- avar 9y ago> run a forked codebase on isolated servers[...] It's not forked at all, when you use the business version of Facebook you can even URL hack public Facebook URLs to share the same global IDs to your "private" instance, and you might even see public comments from public Facebook users. It's also possible to invite public Facebook accounts to your groups in your business instance, to them they're just browsing another group on Facebook.com. So the Facebook Business instances really aren't separated out at all more than just being the equivalent of an aggregation on private groups on facebook.com + custom domain etc. Edit: I just tested this by taking a random post of Zuckerberg's and replacing www. in the URL with <mycompany>. and sure enough, Zuck then shows up on our "internal" Facebook, albeit with a notice saying it's a public post. You can then "share" the post and get the same behavior as on public Facebook when you share an existing group post to another group or message.
- pbalau 9y agoSo, you are saying one can share links on Workplace? I can see some uses for this feature...
- avar 9y agoYes it's useful. Not saying it's bad if they've got their ACLs right. It's just an interesting leaky abstraction showing that it's little more than a whitelabel for Facebook.com.
- afro88 9y agoIt can still be a forked codebase and do all of what you say. What you’re outlining is that it’s not isolated from public Facebook infrastructure.
- avar 9y agoIndeed. My comment only shows that, but as a follow-up it's also clearly not a forked codebase. Facebook UI changes show up at the exact same time, and as a practical matter they must be syncing regularly if both access the same underlying storage.
- amelius 9y agoI thought this was a protection against the Bobby Tables problem.
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y agoCopying and pasting SQL (and other code) works just fine in Slack btw...
- johannes1234321 9y ago... if you mark it as such with backticks, else emojis, link detection, username lookup, ... destroy it.
- blauditore 9y agoIt's also quite weird when it linkifies a two-letter word (non-English) because it thinks I might be referring to a week day, which has never been the case so far.
- majewsky 9y ago> Posted in: Hackerterrorcybercyber :)
- bertil 9y agoFor what it’s worth: the expected behaviour to swap code snippets internally is to share a link to an internal version of pastebin/gist that allows comments, version control and referencing. Whether that has to be compulsive or whether casual code is fine is probably a worst contention that vim vs. emacs so I’ll just leave that here. On Workplace by Facebook: I can see how that seems counter-intuitive, but I’ve worked for four distinct companies who had it or moved to using it, with or without Slack and (given some hints on how to use it properly) this is the most compelling solution to a lot of internal communication issues. It’s about as impactful as email or cellphone: you can’t really understand how things work without. I am not considering working for a company that doesn’t use it (or an improvement).
- johannes1234321 9y agoThis depends on the snippet size and purpose. For collaboration on code it's likely the wrong tool. However when exchanging single statements there is no good reason to switch between tools.