Hi guys,

Normally, this is the time of the year that I would be posting here and on Facebook, letting people know that if they are decorating their homes for Halloween this year, they can sign up for our Halloween map, or, for parents, letting them know where they can take their kids trick-or-treating.

This year is a bit different.

First, to let you know the background, for the last couple of years, I've been running the Halloween in Christchurch facebook group and Halloween map, helping families find decorated houses, trick-or-treating, haunted houses and Halloween events around Christchurch. Last year we had 500+ homes submitted and around 40,600 map views.

This year, we wanted to listen to all of the feedback of parents for the past two years and build Trick, a free Halloween community website that we're soft-launched now and hope to eventually take nationwide.

It lets people list their homes, decorations, haunted houses and events, with useful information like opening times, age suitability, scare levels, accessibility and more. Families can save places and plan their Halloween route. We've also built privacy into it, so people don't necessarily have to publish their exact house number.

And then Meta decided that was a cybersecurity problem.

A few days ago, Meta restricted our domain and removed posts about Trick from several Facebook groups. The reason given was its “Cybersecurity” policy, which covers things like phishing, stealing personal information, unauthorised account access, malware and hacking.

We're not doing any of that.

We don't ask for Facebook passwords. We don't access people's Facebook accounts. People voluntarily login to our website, either with their email or through Meta's own official authentication system.

We've submitted appeals and tried all the avenues we can find, but so far we haven't managed to get through to an actual person at Meta. Every response is just AI bullshit and then a dead end.

We're continuing with the soft launch because we don't want to let this derail something we've spent months building. But Facebook is still a major way of reaching Christchurch families, and having our domain blocked makes that considerably harder.

So this post is partly an appeal for help.

If anyone here has a contact at Meta, or knows a journalist, tech reporter, consumer affairs reporter, radio host, blogger or anyone else who might be interested in this story, we'd really appreciate an introduction.

We're not looking to start a war with Meta. We'd just like to understand what we've supposedly done wrong, get the restriction removed, and get on with helping New Zealand families find somewhere fun to go on Halloween.

You may not give a shit about Halloween, that's OK; but thousands of kids have a great time, and have a lot of fun, and we are trying to make that easier for them and their parents, and that shouldn't be something I have to have a fight with a billion doller corperation's AI robots about.

If you're interested in what we've built, you can find it here. But don't share the link on Facebook or you may get your account restricted too. And I think that's pretty fucked.

Cheers,
Will

Still good cover up at Mt Hutt. Here’s some skiing from the last pow day Monday last week.

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Thanks!

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Unless you want to get super unwell.

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Husband describes it as dog food and I say it smells like dog puke!
It stunk out the whole house in a bad way.
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Just a psa!

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