
Facebook at Work spamblocks some SQL queries - omnibrain
http://blog.koehntopp.info/index.php/3122-things-you-cannot-say-on-facebook-sql-edition/
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cup-of-tea
When 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?"

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rootlocus
Chat 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.

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simias
Funny 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.

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reificator
Discord is (a subset of) markdown so you just use [`] to denote inline code
and [```language-name] and [```] to denote code blocks.

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simias
I did not know that, thank you.

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raitom
Automated 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!

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asah
"business version of Facebook"

There's your first problem.

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Traubenfuchs
Who thought "business version of Facebook" was a good idea?

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isotopp
My 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.

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nightcracker
Could you explain what features make it so good for your use case?

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isotopp
I 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.

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dmitriid
Experience 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

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underwater
Facebook runs on Facebook. When I was there it worked really well.

You need to use it properly though. The feed is pretty much useless. Groups
are where it’s at. Facebook has Company FYI groups, org-level FYI groups,
Product team workspaces, etc. You tune notifications to catch the “must read”
stuff and filter out the rest of the noise.

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dmitriid
> You need to use it properly though.

"You're holding it wrong"

> <an unending list of things I have no desire to figure out or set up>

Why would I want any of that? :)

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kalleboo
While 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

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dijit
Also known as the Scunthorpe problem[0]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem)

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Jedd
In 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.

~~~
thallian
10 years ago at school I could not search for documentation about strings or
"insert" clauses (sql) because that would trigger the firewall. Fun times.

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technion
In 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.

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didymospl
I 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)

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isotopp
``` for quoting code does not prevent the sd.date_of_delivery problem. It
still urlifies, and the DNS parser tokenises wrongly.

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didymospl
Thanks, 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.

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mediumdeviation
I 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.

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avar

        > 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.

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afro88
It 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.

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avar
Indeed. 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.

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antihero
Why on earth would you use Messenger for anything useful?

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slig
People 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.

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wink
Introducing <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?

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slig
Sure, 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).

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bertil
For 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).

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johannes1234321
This 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.

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SmellyGeekBoy
Copying and pasting SQL (and other code) works just fine in Slack btw...

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johannes1234321
... if you mark it as such with backticks, else emojis, link detection,
username lookup, ... destroy it.

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amelius
I thought this was a protection against the Bobby Tables problem.

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blauditore
It'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.

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yAnonymous
On the other hand, it potentially punishes people for not putting spaces after
punctuation. I say keep it like that.

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znpy
> On a business instance of Facebook it has literally no business to listen
> in, but does.

What did he expect ?

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OrganicMSG
I have never heard of the business version of facebook before. Is it common
anywhere?

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majewsky
> Posted in: Hackerterrorcybercyber

:)

