Family Module Bug

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There is a serious issue affecting the Family Module and it was discovered the hard way. Some families are unable to recruit new players because of an apostrophe symbol in their family name. Customer Support maintains that family names can't be changed so these families are stuck and unable to get new members. This is a long known issue involving single quote or apostrophe symbols. In the coding world it is often referred to as a tick mark. Perhaps it's not worth the man hours for Zynga to fix but it's really not fair to those families affected. The Hungarian's Arrows Family is a perfect example.

You may recall the Hungarian's Arrows Family made an appearance on the Family Leaderboard during the early stage of the Death By Ice Event. They are a well known and established family.

If you look at their Family Rank data, you can see the member decline. 83 days ago they had 100 members and now they are left with 64. This isn't because players don't want to join their family. Many have been waiting for a long time.

What is happening to this family is they can't send Family Invites to the players they have recruited. The reason is the apostrophe character causes the javascript to terminate the string of code containing the family name and it can't interpret it properly. Obviously this family has been dealing with Customer Support. They hand fed Zynga the problem and the solution. There have been over 15 e-mail exchanges and the latest has been the most promising. They are contuniously told to try sending from requests from mafiawars.com instead of Facebook but that hasn't solved their issue. Customer Support is quick to pass out Reward Points as compensation but families with this problem don't want that. They want a to grow their families. Too many players quit the game for any family to keep the same 100 members.

I understand that your Family Invites are not working properly. I will do all I can to correct this for you.
I appreciate the report that you have provided on how this feature is working and your feedback as it will be invaluable for us to determine how to enhance the feature's performance. I will be sending your concern directly to a more Specialized Team so that it can be addressed and a resolution provided as quickly as possible.
As a personal gesture, I added 30 Reward Points to your account"...

Zynga charges 50 Reward Points to create a family. They promise players that they will be able to "Recruit and select new members for your family". Zynga isn't fulfilling their end of the bargain for families with apostrophe symbols.

If they aren't going to fix the problem or change the name of families who are affected, the least they could do is warn new players and not allow them to create names with apostrophes. There is a filter preventing players from using profanity so why can't they add symbols that will interfere with the back code? As an example, Mike Nestor tried to create a family and named it the Shit Starters.

The purchase was cut off and the message "This family name contains inappropriate words. Please keep family names tasteful". Why can't that make one that says "This family name contains symbol(s) that jack up our code. Please keep family names simple."?

A name change would be an easy fix but Customer Support states they aren't able to do that. Back in August, the {ASS} Family had their tag removed because some players reported it as offensive (1). Prior to protesting this decision, we were offered the opportunity to choose a new tag. I don't know why someone at Zynga can't just change the Hungarian's Arrows name to Hungarians Arrows. 

This isn't the first time apostrophes have cause issues in Mafia Wars. On more than one occasion, apostrophe, single quotes or other symbols in front of a Facebook name has messed with Boss Fight help, Job help and Property Part help requests. The work around was to remove the symbol from your name. Recently Zynga claimed to have fixed this issue. The fact that it is persisting in the Family Module would make me thing twice about adding any symbols to my Facebook name.

#2       07-24-2010, 10:53 AM

Al Catraz  Super Moderator   Join Date: Jul 2009 Posts: 15,409

Hi there, I think I might know what the issue is. Does your Facebook name have an apostrophe in it? If you do, try and remove it, and those posts may start working immediately. If this does not apply, please let me know. Thanks __________________

#3       Today, 11:01 PM

Cerulean Master  Super Moderator   Join Date: Dec 2010 Location: Ummm, The Forum Posts: 7,436

If you had an apostrophe (') in front of your name, you would not have been able to post. This should have been resolved in a release this morning. If you are still experiencing issues, please let me know. Thanks, CM __________________

During the Hustlin' With Dre Gifting Event, the Doctor's Order gift requests didn't work because of the apostrophe (1). As soon as it was removed, the requests started working as they should.

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Article written by Jennifer Patterson, Creator of the MW Loot Lady Blog, The Mafia Wars Loot Lady Facebook Fan Page and Co-Host of The Informant Podcast. All material is protected by copyright law