I have a LAMP website which allows users to share a graph on Facebook. It was woking fine until May 1st but now whenever I try to share, I just get a grey box.
My site was using sharer.php to do the sharing and giving as the url a document which would generate a single graph, and in it's og:image and og:image:url tags I put a url which points to some code which generates an 800 x 400 png of the same graph. If I copy either url into a browser, they render exactly what I would expect, but if I post the same url to the Sharing Debugger tool, it gives me a blank image.
I have noticed that although clicking the Scrape Again button usually calls the url which renders the image as a png, every now and then it does not, but there is no indication as to why and the Scraped URL page shows exactly the page I would expect with the correct og:image tags.
I have tried changing from using sharer.php to the FB.ui 'share' method, but this has not fixed the issue.
I have also tried asking in the Facebook Developer Community but have had no response. I even tried to raise a bug with Facebook, but it won't let me.
This is driving me nuts. I just don't understand why it has suddenly stopped working. Have I missed something or has Facebook changed anything in the Sharer functionality? Is there any other way to debug this ?
Update: After a lot of tinkering I have found out that this only affects my account, and it affects anything I share on Facebook, not just things from my own site. Furthermore, it's only the preview of the shared page which is not working. What actually gets posted to Facebook is the correct image. I have tried multiple PC's and multiple browsers and it always fails even if I switch off all anti-virus/anti-malware/firewalls etc. Bizarrely, if I share from my phone, it works!
Related
I have started to experience a really strange problem with Facebook link scraping/caching which seems random in nature.
On brand new posts when I go to check: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/ with my new URL I get a message saying 'Cannot scrape: URL blocked'
We have literally been sharing URL's to Facebook for YEARS with no problem whatsoever. All open graph tags are present and working fine.
What is really weird is if I just manually press the 'scrape again' button it grabs all the bits properly and says everything is fine. It's always just the first attempt.
I have also tried manually calling the scrap API instead of letting Facebook do it when someone shares the URL for the first time and still sometimes (not always) it returns empty (just 'id' and 'url' returned) indicating the URL was blocked.
What's going on here it's driving me mad? We are nowhere near our API limits if maybe that was the issue...
Why would it say blocked first go on the debug page then literally 2 seconds later you press 'scrape again' and it works fine.
Just to note sometimes when it says blocked it still shows maybe the image in the link preview but no title or description. It's like it's grabbed some tags but then given up. Very strange...
I have checked our access logs and I can see 'Facebot' accessing our site fine.
Hope someone can help, I am really hoping this is some weird Facebook bug as I can't see any change in our code base that would effect this.
Facebook does not return anything helpful when this happens even with the API. I have no way in contacting Facebook direct either. If we are somehow getting blocked I would love to know why and fix that issue. But it's impossible to debug at the moment.
Just to note I have 3 sites all running the same code base (WordPress environment). They are all experiencing this issue. All been running fine for many years.
Cheers
This was to do with rate limiting that was not visible in the Facebook APP dashboard. Helpful...
Full details here: https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/232343637174087/
Solution for your problem: You can use Facebook image button after adding link on Facebook news feed, like shown in iamge
second thing upload image on othe site and give the image path to your website and then put it on your news feed, you can get definitely positive result using this two methods.
also refer this image
thanks hope this two will work for your problem
I've seen this is a common issue here on stack but it seems that the answer is always dependent on the specific scenario. I'm looking for a fellow coder to give me that "AHA" moment.
Problem: Ads posted to my website do not show the og:image content when shared to facebook until the ad is shared at least 4 times
I have thought about/ tried the following things
Checking the image size to make sure it's not large (128kb) is the norm. I compress all uploads.
Giving the ad some time to marinate before sharing (perhaps the fb crawler takes a while to cache the page)
I tried using the debug crawler tool on fb to see if I could reproduce the problem and I indeed could.
I tried sharing the ad to my own page regardless of the missing image to see if the image showed up on my wall. It did not.
The image will not show up on ANY shares until someone has clicked on the share icon on an ad at least 4 times. It seems to me like it might be some latency issue on facebook's part.
What could cause og:image to only show on subsequent share clicks?
Edit
Here's a test ad.
https://www.jdmxchange.com/Classifieds/Details/6ae72690-14d8-4bab-b039-3a2d79923794
Reading https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/best-practices I found this, which might be just what you're looking for:
Use og:image:width and og:image:height Open Graph tags
Using these tags will specify the image to the crawler so that it can render it immediately without having to asynchronously.
This means, if you set the width and height of your og:image with tags, the image will show straight away.
UPDATE
Actually debugging your URL shows like this URL is redirecting to another page, and then another. Which makes me suspect the Facebook crawler is not able to access the actual OG meta tags you're using.
As a random test, I would add OG metatags to that last URL and see if Facebook uses them. But the actual solution would be to use URLs which are actually reachable to FB (no credentials necessary).
Upon sharing a link on Facebook with og:image and og:video tags it will, under the right conditions, consistently display the wrong thumbnail image. Our clients are having this problem but unfortunately I cannot consistently replicate the conditions under which this issue occurs.
Go to the QVC UK Facebook page and look for video shares (example post). You'll see that the thumbnail for the video is the QVC logo when it should be the image given in the og:image tag. When putting the link through Facebook's debug tool the correct image is displayed with no content warnings or errors. This only seems to be happening when the URL is shared for the first time as subsequent shares will display the correct image. The image is present on our CDN before the URL is shared on Facebook. When I did manage to luckily replicate this issue; running the debugger before sharing on Facebook did not seem to solve the problem.
Am I missing something obvious, is there something wrong with my meta tags or could this be a potential facebook bug?
I've seen that multiple people are recording the same sort of problem on Facebook however only this bug has been left open (as of June 21st). In a related bug report Facebook mention that their crawlers don't only look at the image in the og tag but also look for other relevant images within the page.
Is it possible that it is seeing the QVC logo used so many times on the page that it decides to randomly overwrite the one specified?
Thanks
-- UPDATE
This only seems to be a problem when sharing to Facebook pages as opposed to a user's timeline. Changing the image URL seems to have temporarily fixed the problem. This looks like a Facebook bug
Over the past few weeks we have been finding that facebook posts (not shares from the in-page FB button) have been failing to show the images tagged with og:image on our site. Our home page http://www.greatbritishchefs.com is an example. This seems to be a change in behaviour at Facebook's end because pages which were working a few weeks ago now do not. Also where a page is working currently, running it through the FB debugger causes it to immediately fail. Removing the og:image tag does not work. The images seem to be the right size, and the debugger results are free of errors regarding the image.
Would be grateful for help from anyone who is also experiencing this.
OK I found the resolution to this. What appears to have happened is that Facebook has become much more demanding about what kind of image urls it will work with in posts. The images on our site are sourced through a handler which preprocesses the image, putting a watermark on, resizing etc. and therefore the url might look like:
http://www.greatbritishchefs.com/getmedia/0ecdeb1f-c194-42a9-b465-012004a6cd99/AYW001-Website-Edited-Featured-Bacon-Breadsticks-Closeup/?width=420&height=270&ext=.jpg
This will now not work. For some reason, the url has to be completely vanilla without any query strings and with a standard image extension. When I rewrite the url for og:image to follow those rules, the images reappear in posts.
Hope this helps someone
James
I'm sure anyone who has worked with Facebook has encountered the url unreachable problem with the comments plugin and alike.
I managed to get around this initially by making urls go to the facebook app page rather the hosted page, figuring facebook would be able to find itself, and ammended the url with a query string which could internally redirect them to right content. For example "app.facebook.com/myApp/?myAppP=videos&myAppId=0001" would first of all load the facebook app page then redirect the iframe to show the videos page and play video 0001.
This worked great at first but seems to have become a little unpredictable. I have a list of different videos, all of which use the same url except that the "myAppId" is different so the correct video is loaded. However whilst the "comments" and "like" plugins work fine for about a 1/3 of them, the other 2/3 show the "url unreachable". I can see no correlation between the urls that work and those that don't. It seems completely random, but it is always the same one that do and don't work.
This has got me completely stumped. Any ideas?
try to disable sandbox on app settings