You joke, but this is a real concern for me ... even if I do get a person replying here, presumably the hacker used dodgy means of getting access in the first place! how can I definitively prove what I'm saying is true?
My main hope is that it will be clear from the page's history that I've been involved from the very start, and the new "owner's" actions will look as suspicious to a real human as they do to me!
In the meantime, I've updated my blog to mention this discussion, proving at least the blog part of my ownership :)
I have nothing to gain from a PR stunt. As you can see from my website, it's a small blog, not a mainstream professional website. But it means a lot to me sentimentally, because it's something I have been working on for 11 years, and a small (well, 56k small) community of metalheads was built around it. The last few years the only content was the end of year lists, but this was very popular on Facebook.
I think the main reason it became valued among metalheads is because it's not a "mainstream" list, of the kind promoted by the music industry, every year the same people... I go to great lengths to find out great music. Often enough, a band which I think deserves to be on the top 20 list may be relatively unknown in mainstream media, and both the bands and fans seem to find value in this and thank me for it.
Check out the end-of-year list for 2021. You may find something you like. I particularly recommend the top ranked album on that list, Thy Catafalque!
There is no "legacy FB page" to join as a participant. That's the problem. The hackers deleted the page.
I mentioned it to another poster here, but essentially I tried to inform my subscribers about the hack before the page was deleted, as part of a high-profile post (the end of year best metal albums post, which is the yearly highlight of the page, and always gets a lot of visibility).
Unfortunately, not many people seemed to notice or act on the 'hack' stuff in the post, even though the post itself did actually get a lot of votes and 'thank you' replies from bands. But only a handful of people subscribed to the 'backup' page that I mentioned in that post.
Unless I manage to get the page restored somehow, the best I can hope for is that next year, anyone who "actively" looks for the end of year list and notices the page is gone, might decide to google 'metalised', end up on my blog, see what happened, and subscribe to the backup page ... but that already feels like it would be too much effort for the average facebook user, even if they did get value from that community. To be honest, it's more like the commenter below says. If my Heavy Metal community A disappears overnight, chances are people will simply jump over to Heavy Metal community B rather than start looking for 'fediverse' stuff (I don't even know what that is, to be honest, and I doubt many of my subscribers would either).
I'm fairly sure the way they managed to claim ownership in the first place was by 'claiming the page for their business', because no business account was associated with the page.
In my case there was no 'business manager' associated with the page because it was a community page. But it's not a stretch of the imagination to imagine there are many 'business' pages out there, which are still managed via a personal account only, and can be 'plucked away' from their owners by a scammer the same way!
I would have thought Facebook would at least have some sort of semi-automated "dispute" process for when someone claims your page at the very least!
Hi dmortin, I have no way of knowing for sure, but I think it was none of that.
I think they simply 'claimed' the page, and because it's was a community page with no 'business' associated with it in the account, they managed to use Facebook's automated 'claim this page for your business' processes to their advantage. Which obviously is a scam, but a hard one to contest when there's no human you can get hold of at Facebook to point it out.
My previous posts (see the older HN links on my post above) have some more details about the chronology of the "hack" (if that's even the right word for it) and how the scammers tried to capitalise on it.
Obviously I've changed all my passwords just in case though...
The problem with this is that, even though the Facebook Page was simply mirroring the content on the blog, most of the interactions with actual bands and fans was via the Facebook page, not the blog. I don't really know if the blogpage itself has the same readership; if anything it's the other way round: I'm worried that with the Facebook page gone, people won't know to find the blog. And with the page deleted, I have no visible way of informing my subscribers either.
I did create a 'backup' page on Facebook (here: https://www.facebook.com/Metalised-Life-112985154608128) and announced the hack to people on the 'main' page, but the main page was taken down before people subscribed to the backup. Annoyingly, this announcement was part of the same post announcing the 'best of 2021 metal albums', which got many upvotes and replies from the bands and fans involved, but it's almost as if nobody noticed the part about the hack and the 'backup' page in the post...
These reviews get cross-posted on the facebook page, and tend to be very popular, both by fans and featured bands alike.