Photo: Keith Allison

Mark Cuban and George Takei, take heart! The Dallas Mavericks owner and former Star Trek star have been kicking up a fuss of late about the way the social media site filters posts from Facebook Pages, suggesting that Facebook prevents their posts from showing up in users' New Feeds as a means to selling promoted posts.

Facebook maintained that it was simply protecting users' feeds from being dominated by Page owners. Mr. Cuban told ReadWriteWeb that the Dallas Mavericks, the NBA franchise that he owns, would be de-emphasizing Facebook in its social media efforts.

Well, now Wired's Ryan Tate reports that Facebook may have hit on a means of defusing the situation. To wit, the company is debuting a feature called "Pages Feed," which gather posts exclusively from the Pages a user follows:

Facebook has been testing the special News Feed view over the last few weeks and plans to start rolling it out to all users later today. “It’s a ‘Pages only’ view of your news feed, making it even easier for people to keep up with the Pages they care about most,” a spokesperson writes. “You can access the new feed view from your home page by clicking ‘Pages feed’ on the left hand side of the page.” The feed will select the most relevant pages posts for you algorithmically, meaning that you aren’t guaranteed to see all posts from all the pages you follow. But you’ll see more pages content than you would in the aggressively filtered regular News Feed.

Per Mr. Tate, Facebook says the new feature isn't a response to Mr. Cuban. Meanwhile, a quick check reveals Pages Feed up and running on our Facebook page, although perhaps not filtered as aggressively as we'd like:

One of the offending shirts.

What if you had such a staunch following on Facebook that posting a link resulted in so may clicks that the ISP thought you were staging a DDoS attack? That's what happened to George Takei, who is best known for playing fan favorite Mr. Sulu in the Star Trek films and series.

Mr. Takei has over two million Facebook fans. An average post receives thousands of comments, likes and shares, numbers that would have most social marketers foaming at the mouth. He shares tons of memes, weird news articles and videos, and is apparently also fond of Sulu-themed LGBTQ merchandise, as that's where he ran into trouble with one paranoid ISP.

According to The Register:

The Star Trek star posted a link to a gay-pride T-shirt with a Takei twist to his two million fans on the social network and the click-through rates were so high that his servers believed they were being attacked by a nefarious bot rather than customers with a genuine interest in Takei-themed T-shirts.

"Apparently, my fans here collectively can now resemble a coordinated worldwide web assault," Takei said in a Facebook post, after the site had been brought back online.

Frankly, we're unsurprised at the volume of people dazzled by gay pride-Takei-mashup wear. Who wouldn't want a "Takei and proud!" t-shirt?