Before Digg went on its banning rampage, they had a little bug. If you had friended someone that had their account banned, you'd get an error when you clicked on the "remove friend" button in their interface. If one of your friends were banned, you couldn't remove them.

That wasn't such a big deal when bannings were few and far between, but with the recent spate of bannings Digg had created a bit of a problem. There is a hard limit of 1,000 friends for a user on Digg. So if 100 of your friends had been banned, you were effectively left with only 900 slots.

A few days ago I noticed that Digg had finally fixed that problem. I don't know when it happened, but at some point they implemented a kludge that allows you to delete friends that have been banned.

The Good News

As the saying goes, I told you all that so I could tell you this. By fixing that bug, they've introduced a new bug which most power users will find is a real feature. If you were a banned power user, one of the most stinging aspects of the ban is the loss of all your friend data. You'd spent months building up a nice friend network, and now all that data was gone. But is it?

Try this page: Oliver Taco's Profile. Yep, it's the oops page as expected. Now try the same page but via the Digg API. Again, as expected you get a "No such user" error return. Now, try this: Oliver Taco's Friend List.

The data is still in the database. They couldn't delete the linkages because that would obviously break something else that allows the banned users to be removed as friends. So the upshot it that even if your account is banned, you can recover your friend list. Just replace the user name and change the value of "offset" to 100, 200, 300, etc and you'll get pages of data 100 records at a time. If you want a list of your fans, just change the "friends" to "fans". BTW, that's an XML file that you can download into Excel if you want to see a pretty spreasheet.

Of course, if you were using a tool like the PMS Social Suite none of that would be a concern because you'd be concentrating on building real relationships outside of social networks and wouldn't be a victim of the whims of Digg.