Dear Facebook Support 👌🏼♥️

EDIT (April 25th, 2016 – username form opened back up, was able to change my username back to @arthurcolle ☺️)

It is impossible to reach you! Wish there was a way we could chat :) So I had the handle @arthurcolle on @Facebook since the very initial introduction of vanity URLs to profiles but a system error led it to be deleted, and I subsequently found out the hard way that there is no real infrastructure in place for anyone to contact you when things go awry. As social networking platforms become an increasingly powerful force in society, this can lead to very real negative consequences, and there should definitely be better help avenues other than the goofy FAQ with the owl… I have yet to find a single mechanism to contact Facebook support in a meaningful way, including email or phone or even a little live chat. How can you own Messenger and not have the best “hey something went wrong” chat hotkey for your users? It sucked to have to file things with the existing Support Inbox that gives you automated replies without ever resolving your issue.

The previous naming scheme meant that most peoples’ profile URLs would look something like “facebook.com/profile.php?id=123123124699”. It was logical to move to personalized URL handles from a usability perspective. I immediately registered @arthurcolle as I have on many sites since then.

In Settings, when I clicked the submit button with the handle @ARTHURCOLLE (same string of characters but in all caps), an error message and a reload occurred in parallel, and my profile no longer had an associated vanity URL, but a random number as it used to be before personalization was introduced. After several years of having it, it would be great if I could speak with someone about this occurrence and getting my old handle back? It seems like a bug in settings, some kind of validation step would be an improvement and allow the same thing to happen to others.

I own arthurcolle.com and have the @arthurcolle handle on almost every other internet service that I’ve found useful over time, so losing the FB one permanently would be a real bummer! To list a few examples:

news.ycombinator.com/user?id=arthurcolle, twitter.com/arthurcolle, github.com/arthurcolle, medium.com/@arthurcolle and arthurcolle@gmail.com. keybase.io/arthurcolle is me, facebook.com/arthurcolle was also me, and while this bug might not be the biggest issue in the world it highlighted the difficulty in getting someone at Facebook to talk to, even as someone that is computer savvy and could offer useful input in what actually occurred, that led to this small yet inconvenient situation. That the validation directly took user input and failed to validate it seems pretty serious.

Does anyone know what I could do to get it back? If someone at Facebook is reading this I’d appreciate any input. You can reach me at arthurcolle@gmail.com or hello@arthurcolle.com

This was an accident and I didn’t intend to lose my online handle in one of the most integral tools of this generation. Thanks

Best, Arthur Colle