Facebook: Too Many Redirects
If you’ve suddenly lost access to your Facebook page, you know how frightening it is. A million things go through your mind, the worst being that Facebook locked your account for some strange reason. In my case, I needed access to my Facebook Author Page (officially called a Business Page) because I wanted to announce a guest post I had done on a blogger’s site. I punched in my username and password, but when I hit return, the page hung there and never loaded. I tried a different browser and reset the password, to no avail. I googled the problem to see what I could find (zip), and got nowhere on Facebook’s help menu.
What I found out was that the page was stuck in an endless loop of redirects. I was convinced my account was locked (it wasn’t, but more about that below). It didn’t seem hacked, as there were no posts other than mine. I searched Facebook’s community forum. Failing to find answers there, I posted my question there, which to this day, remains unanswered. Elsewhere, I found that it might be possible to create a new author page and merge it with the old one, but there were no guarantees this would work, Likes and posts might be lost, and Facebook would require me to submit documentation that I was who I said I was. And if neither of those options worked, I would have to start from scratch and restart building my followers.
My Author Page is ten years old, started back in the day when I could Like other pages from it. I had seen prompts to claim the page from a Personal account, but honestly, I couldn’t figure out how to do that. My fear now was that Facebook had frozen the account since it had never been claimed.
Later, I wondered if somehow my internet router had been hacked. In desperation, I asked my brother to try to log in from his computer. That opened up a can of worms, but the upshot is that I became convinced that Facebook hadn’t locked the page. Some weeks in to this, I decided to try one more stab of looking for solutions online. This time I hit paydirt. Literally hundreds of people were complaining of the same problem. They reported that they could logon to their accounts from phones, but not PCs, no matter what browser was used. In addition, no one’s personal page was affected.
Finally, some way down in the community of posts, a sharp guy gave the solution: Logon, go to https://www.Facebook/home, and in the corner you can find a dropdown where you can switch back to the classic look. Seems that when Facebook launched the Beta look, they left in a bug that wouldn’t route the page correctly.
The first thing I did when I regained access to the page was to claim it and make myself an admin from my personal account. Since then, there have been no problems accessing the Author Page.
So that’s the solution. Of course, other problems can occur. You might check other resources to see how to claim pages or merge pages, if that reflects the difficulty your having.
In other news, some of you who have been following me for awhile know that I’ve been working on a young adult science fiction trilogy. Last spring, I entered the unpublished manuscript to the Florida Writer’s Association Royal Palm Award. Happily, the novel is a Finalist, winners to be announced in October. Keeping my fingers crossed, and hoping to pitch the story to agents at FWA’s annual convention (this year’s happening virtually).
Wishing all of you happy reading, happy writing.
Stay Healthy!
A.R. Silverberry
Cerberus, Tales of Magic and Malice, by A. R. Silverberry
CERBERUS, TALES OF MAGIC AND MALICE, Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087PNJNLM
