How long does an app in development get banned from Facebooks if it exceeds limits?

Question

I have an app I'm developing against Facebook that timed out a few hours ago during my first production use. Of course I tried to get it do too much and the http call timed out. So, I rewrote what I was doing to use threaded connections, which sped up the interaction significantly! However, I was so engrossed in getting my interaction to speed up (it equated to about 25-50 calls, not exactly sure, I was expecting 25 but some of my results show it was 50 times), I didn't even stop to think about how fast I was hitting facebook.

So, I started getting the "Uncaught OAuthException: It looks like you were misusing this feature by going too fast. You窶况e been blocked from using it." which is what I now get even if I try to run my program with only 1 hit. I've added a sleep into my system to limit the hits at 1/second, but I'm concerned that my app (that was not making public posts so no one could have been bothered by them) is now forever banned from facebook, as it says I'm banned from the feature with a reference to learn about blocks in the Help Center; except I can't find any reference in the Help Center to my specific situation.

Does anyone know how long my app is out of commission?

And what are the specific (reference please, because I've search the hell out of fb and can't find one) limits regarding speed at which you can access facebook?

Answer 1

It depends on what has blocked you. In this case it was a spam bot that stopped me from posting comments into a group. Apparently there is a non-specific number of times you can post comments in a group in a short amount of time. The amount varies, but hovers around 150ish give or take 50 (at the time of my tests).

The ban appeared to be consistently set to about 19 hours at that time (May 2014). I've confirmed by continued testing in test groups and subsequent bans. However, Facebook developers are unable to give a solid set of numbers as they say it's controlled by a spam algorithm which changes based on server usage. So, 150 comments within about 3 minutes = ban for about 19 hours.