F*ck Facebook to Hell! :-(

*sigh* Have I mentioned lately just how MUCH I hate Facebook? The feeling is obviously mutual. Since I got back from Albacon, Facebook has been giving me endless trouble. It won’t let me log in, saying my account is “temporarily unavailable due to system maintenance.” Or, it lets me log in, but won’t let me post any updates or comments, and won’t echo Tweets. Or, it lets me log in and do something, then a few minutes later if I try to make a post, says, “you have to be logged in to do that.” When I go to the Facebook log-in home page, my e-mail address doesn’t appear in the little box as it normally does. I tried accessing Facebook in Firefox and got exactly the same results (while Firefox went and got updates for itself and told me I HAD to upgrade Flash Player RIGHT AWAY), so it’s not MSIE. Concurrently with this issue, I’d also noticed that the big Dell was running very sluggishly in general, even for things that didn’t utilize the ‘Net a lot like MS Word (but Word can access the ‘Net, for example, for online help or getting libraries of clip art, so the Internet connection affects it). Even more suspiciously, I suddenly couldn’t play streaming video clips without their halting every ten seconds to buffer, like I was on dial-up or something.

After wrestling with all this for several days, today I:

• cleared the browser cache, history, cookies and everything–stripped it bare, didn’t save any passwords or favorite sites or anything at all;
• updated Flash Player;
• ran several diagnostic and fix-it apps for the hard drive, which is getting full (the computer is three years old);
• finally thought to reset the modem and wireless router, which I hadn’t done for a while.

All of this tremendously improved the performance of the computer and solved the streaming video problem. But Facebook is being just as difficult as ever. For a short time tonight I was able to post to Facebook from my netbook, Pigwidgeon, but that didn’t last long. After I’d made a few comments and updates–and it still wouldn’t echo Tweets–I got the “you must be logged in to do that” error again, logged out, tried to log in and was denied. And since I can’t log in, I can’t contact Facebook support! It doesn’t seem to be a generalized problem because other people are updating merrily away and I haven’t seen any complaints in other venues about Facebook. A few people say they’ve had trouble with “apps” but I never use any apps on Facebook.

This is very aggravating because I’ve been connecting with so many people on Facebook exclusively. Hardly anyone reads LJ anymore and Twitter is a sea of marketing and self-promotional messages. I just friended my nephew on Facebook! Gods, but I hate Facebook. There’s nothing worse than a service that makes itself indispensible and then dispenses with you! *grump*