''The Survivors will be allowed back onto the site after their torches are snuffed on the show,'' says Carl Fischer.

It's tough being a Survivor contestant. First you have to outsmart 15 driven people and endure the harsh elements on a deserted island and then, back in civilisation, you are expected to remain under the radar for a very long time. After revealing the identities of the 16 contestants of Survivor South Africa: Malaysia this week, M-Net banned them from the social community internet site Facebook.

''Although Facebook is the latest craze, and the Survivors will be allowed back onto the site after their torches are snuffed on the show, current Survivor secrets, like which Survivor contestant will be voted off next, can unwittingly be disclosed through the mechanisms of this site,'' explains Carl Fischer, M-Net's Head of Original Productions.

''We made this call when we saw how difficult it is for contestants to honour their contractual obligations with respect to secrecy and confidentiality under the veil of Facebook fun.''

Contractually, the Survivors are not allowed to have contact with each other, unless supervised by M-Net, until the final tribal council, but by playing around on Facebook some of them ended up in the same virtual groups. They are also not allowed to create their own blogs or websites or post comments onto any website, without M-Net's permission.

While the contestants will now go into silent mode on Facebook, M-Net is impressed by the amount of internet activity around the show. ''It's exciting to see that Facebookers have already formed Survivor groups and that fans are creating various Survivor South Africa: Malaysia blogs,'' says Fischer.

Survivor fans, who were hoping to hook up with their favourite contestants on Facebook, need not despair. The contestants' pages on the official M-Net Survivor site will be regularly updated with the latest news and photographs and from time to time the Survivors will interact with their fans on MySurvivor in a very similar way to social community sites such as MySpace and Facebook.