I would like to delete thousands of old posts on a Facebook page made by another (discontinued) application.
From what I gather reading the documentation an application can remove only the posts made by itself. This is a reasonable default, but it prevents the development of any kind of administrative or cleanup applications, so I wonder if this is really the case.
Is there a way to mass delete posts made by an application? (If not through the API, perhaps through the UI?)
You just have to go through the page feed with /page-id/feed and delete them one by one: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/post#deleting
You are right though, you can only delete posts made by that App - most likely for safety reasons. A malicious App could just delete all Page entries.
Related
I am currently attempting to retrieve the news feed from my Facebook home feed to include into an app. I know this used to be able to be done with the API however I have heard that it has since been removed. Is there any other way that you know of that would work or has it been added back into the API? It doesn't make sense why they would remove it.
No, there is no way to get a user’s feed via API. That used to be possible in the very early days (API v1), but has long since been removed.
It doesn't make sense why they would remove it.
Apart from user privacy (I don’t want my posts getting analyzed by some shady app with a developer located in $godKnowsWhere, just because they appeared on the feed of a friend of mine who might be using questionable apps), Facebook considers this a “core feature” – and 3rd-party apps are not supposed to replicate those in the first place. Facebook wants to make money from showing me ads when I view my feed, so allowing any other app to perform the same functionality would just mean loss of revenue.
I notice Facebook makes changes every so often. For example, it's html page structure changes every so often (if you write a like count scraper, then all of a sudden your scraper is broken one day).
Also I noticed URLs of the form https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=100000000000000 started redirecting to https://www.facebook.com/{pagename}/videos/100000000000000 .... Probably the redirection will stay the same but I wonder - does Facebook publish these changes in behavior or how do you keep up with them?
I wasn't even sure this was the right place to post but I couldn't find a facebook stackoverflow community....Thanks!
If you build functionality off the Graph API there is a changelog, and versioning support e.g. you can build against a specific version and keep using functionality even though it is removed in later versions.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/changelog
I have like/share buttons on my website and am not currently using an appid. Finding information on whether this is a necessity for the above configuration is difficult to confirm. When going through the Facebook app "create" forms, I'm really confused by a lot of the requirements as it seems to be more focused around actual apps rather than websites, which login via fb etc.
In the past I have created an app for one of my other websites and I don't believe there was any verification/submission process at this point (about 2-3 years ago). Reviewing my old app configuration now I can see that it is not "live" - does anyone know whether Facebook implemented this submission process in the last couple of years, and then de-activated any live apps that were created prior to this?
I now want to setup a new app for my new website and I'm unsure what the different 'action types' mean and what I would need to simply use like/share buttons on the website. Could someone give me a quick run down of what I'd need and what they are?
Any other info/tips people can provide would be greatly appreciated. I'm finding that the like/share DO still work without the app, but sometimes the share button doesn't work properly (I have a feeling this is something to do with the app).
Thanks
If you are just using the Social Plugins, you don't need to have a Facebook App ID.
If you want more integration, it will be required. Creating an App ID is like registering your App, wether an iOS or Android App or just a website, so that you can make Graph API calls for it.
The easiest way to register your website is to go the quickstart: https://developers.facebook.com/quickstarts/?platform=web (or https://developers.facebook.com/apps). There you can type a name and follow the steps.
You can then follow the "Sharing best practices" (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/best-practices#tags) on how to use the App ID. For example, by including an fb:app_id meta tag on your pages.
There is a review process, since last April, but that is only needed if you use permissions for your App. If you just use the plugins, that is not needed.
Can you explain more what is exactly not working?
Update
The time you create a page the Facebook crawler does not know yet what the Opengraph data for that one is. This will happen after the first share, but if you want to ensure it is correct from the first share on, you can force a re-scrape.
This section explains how that works:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/opengraph/using-objects#update
When an app triggers a scrape using an API endpoint This Graph API
endpoint is simply a call to:
POST /?id={object-instance-id or object-url}&scrape=true
Facebook, a multi billion dollar organisation won't fork out for some live chat agents. Instead I'm stuck in a loop asking for approval, them not reviewing my app properly and giving me a cut/paste response. They say they monitor here, so here's hoping.
Nobody but me will ever use my app. It's a PHP page that posts to our radio station's Facebook page timeline www.facebook.com/BCnowplaying every hour or so, music that's playing on Budgie Collective.
We don't want to spam, this is why the nowplaying page is separate to our normal page.
The app works. All it does is grab a token, store it and post info to the page periodically.
I asked for permission to mention pages. And it was like I divided by zero. I only want this to mention pages of the DJ that compiled the mix that's on air (which is a sanctioned mention, as they have asked for this)... so that when their mix comes on, they are notified.
When I ask for the app to be granted this ability, I get told to show how the public will log in and use the app, and to give sample user accounts. Of course I have explained all this when requesting the permissions. But I keep getting knocked back. Nobody will talk to me directly and every time I re-explain and submit, I have to wait for several days to be given an answer that has nothing to do with how my app works. It's like they aren't even reading the submission.
What can I do next?
Since you're the only one using the application, there is no need to apply for approval. Owners of the application can already use the permission without going through the submission process.
By asking for approval you are basically telling Facebook that you want the public to use the mention feature as well.
So the solution here is to use the app as is and just change the settings to public in Settings > Status
Do you want to make this app and all its live features available to the general public?
Switch to yes.
I am trying to make a Facebook bot that will delete everything that I have created: photos, messages, comments, shares, likes and anything else.
What language should I use and how should I start?
You can use whatever you want to code that kind of application. You just need their API and a lot of permissions so you're able to list them and delete then one by one. But why not just deactivate your account?
You will never manage to delete any content on Facebook, everything is just hidden
In general, applications using the API can only delete content that they've created. I.e your app can only delete a photo if it was uploaded using your app.
As a side note, If you want to purge your entire account, why not just delete the entire thing? It's the first result in the help centre for 'delete account' I don't understand why you believe Facebook won't delete your account manually (which they will), but think that doing it via the API would work (it also would, apart from the permissions issue i mentioned)
I am in favor of genesis that Facebook won't delete your data ever, they will just keep it hidden. But my approach would be to make a userscript which you run in your own browser (so short answer is javascript) and just trigger actions as if you were doing that manually. Also take care not to load too many pages too quick, Facebook monitors that. Put some delay after, lets say 2-3 sec after a delete action.
Earlier http://suicidemachine.org/ supported doing that for you, but Facebook banned their service. They should have made their code public so that anyone can run it on their own but then things might have changed and it would need to be maintained to always work but yeah something on github would have been great :D