THOUSANDS of members were wiped from a web page appealing for help to find missing York chef Claudia Lawrence following an overhaul of Facebook, triggering strong criticism by her best friend.

The upgrading work also led to abusive and sexually explicit messages being posted on the Missing Person – Claudia Lawrence section of the social networking site through an internet phenomenon known as “trolling”.

The page was set up shortly after the University of York chef, from Heworth – whose 38th birthday will be marked on Monday – disappeared almost three years ago and had 22,000 members before the glitch led to this falling to just 32.

Attempts are now being made to increase the membership levels, which yesterday stood at 237, but Claudia’s friend Suzy Cooper fears they will never get back to the previous total and has condemned those who posted the offensive messages.

“I just cannot understand why anybody would want to say such abusive things on a Facebook group like this,” she said.

“Not all of them were directed at Claudia or her disappearance, but there were some awful comments which are extremely upsetting, although thankfully they have now been removed.

“We all appreciate why Facebook wanted to carry out upgrades, but we don’t feel taking all the members off a page which has been running for almost three years and is so important was the right way to go about things, especially when people wouldn’t necessarily have known what was happening.

“We are trying to get members back but we don’t feel we will get anywhere near the 22,000 figure we had before, because many people became members through the initial reaction to Claudia’s disappearance when there was so much media coverage. People went to such a lot of trouble to set up this page, and now it feel as if it has all been taken away.”

Facebook said the upgrading work, which has been taking place over the last year, meant members of specific groups had to re-register, and also stressed administrators of individual pages have the ability to block people and remove content. We are absolutely clear that there is no place for trolling on Facebook,” said a spokeswoman. “It’s against Facebook’s rules to intimidate or harass others, and we provide everybody with the tools to report such content via specific links across every page of the site.”