OngoingWorlds blog

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What to do when your Facebook roleplaying account is deleted

Facebook logo in a coffinFacebook can decide whether your roleplaying character lives or dies.

Facebook doesn’t like roleplayers, and if it sees that you have a separate account that you use for roleplaying, your account might be deleted. I’ve written about the reasons why in this post. One of the roleplayers I heard about being deleted was Fleet Admiral Michael Knight, roleplaying as a Star Trek character. He had to recreate his profile.

Michael Knight on FacebookI made up a new e-mail address and then a new profile. Luckily i am friends with a few RP people in RL so they re added me and told other people to add me. was quite easy really. but was a pain in the butt having to make up a new profile.
FltAdm Michael Knight on Facebook

Facebook deletes “fake” accounts

For some, getting a profile deleted on Facebook can be quite traumatic, as you’ve got to recreate your whole profile and build up your digital existence all over again. To your friends and roleplaying partners, it can also be very frustrating.

Janice Rand on facebookI do know someone who sadly got deleted, My Role Play friend, Uhura. she was deleted, probably because her profile was classed as ‘fake’ – but it was upsetting, as she had built up a big profile and we had all her information that she’d personally worked hard on to create her character, and had all our RP friends there, with all the history of the conversations and so on. It’s disappointing when you get deleted, it’s like, loosing a friend. To me any way. I class my Role Play person as a personal friend. Someone i know everything about. It lets me express feeling and look at a situation differently than i would in normal every day life.
Yeoman Janice Rand on Facebook

Create a new account

Unfortunately you’ll have to start all over again. Like Admiral Knight said above, you have to create a new profile and add all your friends again.
To create a new profile, go to the Facebook homepage and sign up using their form.

Make sure you use a different email address

It’s possible that Facebook have deleted your account because they noticed your email address was similar. Either way, creating a new Facebook profile using the same email address is an easy way for Facebook to notice that you’re up to your same old tricks again and delete you a second time.

Use a separate email address, you can create a new one easily by going to gmail or hotmail, and use that to create your roleplaying profile.

Think about using a different name

It’s not essential to use the same name, as many people in the world have the same names. But it might be a good idea, especially if it’s clear from your name that you’re a character and not a real person. Try wording your character’s name differently, adding their middle name, using a misspelling, or hyphenating some words.

Add all your roleplaying friends again

This can take a very long time, start with the important characters in your roleplaying game, so that you can still be involved in what’s going on. Facebook have put a limit on the amount of friends you can invite to be your friends per day, and if you add too many it will start giving you messages that they want to prevent spam. If you continue to invite more people to be your friend they might block you from sending more invites for a couple of days, and force you to read a statement about spam which you have to confirm. A way to get around this is to ask a friend to suggest other friends to you, see below.

Get a friend to suggest other roleplayers to you

It’s quite possible that you won’t remember everyone you’ve been roleplaying with. Ask another friend to suggest all the other roleplayers you were connected with. This will save you a lot of time trying to remember everyone’s names as it’s easy for them to just click “Suggest friends” and choose the thumbnails of people to suggest you to.

Explain to your friends that your profile was deleted

You’ll need to explain to all of your roleplaying friends that your character was removed, so that they can welcome you back and continue roleplaying with you. They might have tagged you in images that now need re-tagging.

Keep a backup of all photos

If you’re reading this because your Facebook page has been removed it might be too late for this now, but it’s always a good idea to keep a backup of all photos you’ve uploaded to Facebook. As you’re using it for roleplaying you might have spent a long time photoshopping your profile picture to put your face onto the body of an elf, or onto a Starfleet uniform, and you don’t want to have to spend time recreating it.

If you’ve added any images into a photo gallery, keep the images on your computer using folders to match each Facebook album.

Try not to get reported

It’s likely that the reason why you got deleted last time was because another member reported your profile as “Fake”. I’ve explained this better in the article “Facebook hates roleplayers”.

You don’t have to use Facebook

Facebook is a great website for interacting with other people also roleplaying as their characters, but there are alternative websites that you can use that are more roleplayer-friendly. There are many forum-based roleplaying games you could join, and games on OngoingWorlds that will let you roleplay for as long as you want, and these don’t have the disadvantages that Facebook has.