There’s been much in the news lately about U.S. border control and the sinister narco tunnelers, but who’s covering the Facebook border section? If you’ve ever come to a really cool Facebook fan page, like National Geographic on Facebook, and tried to post a ‘Thank you for all the great years’ or ‘Anyone seen bigfoot lately?’ comment, there is no mistaking their carefully guarded interface (see screen shot below). This digital real estate is highly controlled, and users can really only make themselves known by commenting on official admin delivered posts. Spammy border crossers hoping to lay some slop on their way through thousands of miles of Facebook trail can hang up their spurs–it ain’t happening here bub, no matter how adventurous Nat Geo’s people say they are.
How do you block wall spammers from Facebook? That’s the simple part. Here’s the back end “border patrol” setting display admins get when they go to “edit page>manage permissions:”
The hard part is whether admins should really be locking down the border like this? This affects everyone. A few spammers end up making the Fan Page a lot less social. It practically eliminates user ability to interact with the Page & other fans, outside of commenting under well-monitored posts. But it’s easy to see how social media managers can get paranoid–they aren’t, after all, on duty 24/7…Zuckerberg forbid someone might post something evil in the middle of the night. But, Facebook wall rushes do happen, and more often than we want to tolerate, so we shut it down to put our worries to rest. And, for a page like Nat. Geo that has over 5 million fans, a little control isn’t a bad thing. In fact, we don’t see how official admins handling big accounts like Nat. Geo. could even compete with user posts, if the fence were lifted.
For the smaller “Pages” out there, we would recommend testing out an open border strategy. Give it 30 days and count the number of spammers you’d like to squash with your border settings–remove the inappropriate posts, of course, 
but don’t lay down the law yet. At the end of the 30 days, if you get better than a 1:5 (spam to legit user posts) then you’re not doing too bad, and it’s probably best to open the gateways for “free travel.” That doesn’t mean you’re a softy: you can still penalize violators individually by removing their posts and banning them!
Feel free to comment (we approve quickly) on what you’re doing and how it’s working out.
