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Facebook Blames a 'Bug' For Not Deleting Your Seemingly Deleted Videos (gizmodo.com)
Last week, The New York Magazine found that Facebook was archiving videos users thought were deleted. The social media company is now apologizing for failing to delete the videos, blaming it on a "bug." It adds that it's in the process of deleting the content now. Gizmodo reports: Last week, New York's Select All broke the story that social network was keeping the seemingly deleted old videos. The continued existence of the draft videos was discovered when several users downloaded their personal Facebook archives -- and found numerous videos they never published. Today, Select All got a statement from Facebook blaming the whole thing on a "bug." From Facebook via New York: "We investigated a report that some people were seeing their old draft videos when they accessed their information from our Download Your Information tool. We discovered a bug that prevented draft videos from being deleted. We are deleting them and apologize for the inconvenience. We appreciate New York Magazine for bringing the issue to our attention."
Facebook was built on PHP with apache web server, they aren't even properly utilizing web sockets yet relying on $.post network storms to update information. Facebooks underlying architecture is garbage technology from around 1995 that they have massaged and tinkered into doing all sorts of back flips. Then it exploded in a sprawl of developer created add-ons along with going IPO and suddenly having an entire board full of nitwits each bellowing their egos into pet projects for the site that was must have because as soon as they said it was must have their underlyings would scream MUST HAVE and sacrifice a burning goat for their over-god executive boss.
Facebook is likely riddled with bugs some caught some lying in wait. They never went back and rebuilt the architecture utilizing nodejs technology and are doomed to continue whipping the dead apache horse until the very last maggot gets its wings. At this point considering that almost their entire code base has been cobbled together at the behest of a hundred screaming heads it is no wonder it would be a mammoth undertaking to rebuild it with proper tech.
There is little if anything that can be done about it either. The whole thing just has to keep failing in spectacular ways until someone comes up with a newer shinier model. Kind of like a ferrari shell ontop of a modified go-kart frame/engine. As far as rebuilding the engine goes, fat chance of that happening. Nodejs took the world by storm and now we have a technology that meets our needs and yet most of the existing architecture/developers are apache. It will take some time until everyone gets caught up and using the right tool for the job.
More likely the real bug was in letting the users download these videos a part of their archives, instead of paying attention to the "deleted" flag.
-- Alastair
The continued existence of the draft videos was discovered when several users downloaded their personal Facebook archives -- and found numerous videos they never published.
The actual bug is that Facebook mistakenly told users of the archived deletions. Reporting of these archived deletions will now correctly be withheld from the personal Facebook archive report. That is all.