The "Facebook Giveaway" app offers the giveaway administrator the option of creating a user blacklist to easily exclude the users he considers. To be able to apply the exclusion, the system is based on the unique identifier that each Facebook user has. The filter to exclude "Previous winners" also uses these unique identifiers.

Until now, a Facebook user had one and only unique identifier, and this was the same for all Facebook pages with which the user interacted. But, on January 8, 2019, Facebook applied a change to their way of saving the unique identifiers of the Facebook users that interact with pages, and now a user has a unique identifier for each page that he interacts with. This means that each user has several different Facebook identifiers. 

This change from Facebook has affected all the Facebook user identifiers that we had stored, and they temporarily stopped working. The following filters in the Facebook giveaways were affected and temporarily disabled:

• User blacklist
• Previous winners

The development team has worked on an update that solves the incident so that both filters are functioning properly again in all new Facebook Giveaways.

Below we detail the main changes and news for each of these filters:

1. Blacklist filter: A new Blacklist system for Facebook users has been designed. The main changes and news are:

• It's necessary to create a blacklist for each Facebook page. This means, there's not one single list with all blacklisted Facebook users but the administrator should create a unique and individual blacklist for each Facebook page that he manages.
• The feature "Blacklist candidates" has been added. Blacklist candidates are Facebook users that you have added to the blacklist for other Facebook pages and the system shows them to you in case you want to add them to the blacklist for the current Facebook page as well. The following users can be blacklist candidates:
  • Users that the system detects were in your old blacklist.
  • Users that are participating in your current giveaway and that are on your blacklist for other Facebook pages.

Note: Read the tutorial to learn how to add Facebook users to the blacklist and how to exclude them from your giveaways

2. Previous winners filter: This filter, that allows excluding winners from previous giveaways carried out in the account, is still available in all Facebook Giveaways. However, because of the changes in the unique identifiers that Facebook has applied, winners from Facebook Giveaways from before January 8th, 2019 cannot be taken into account for this exclusion filter.