I have been working on a Facebook app for some time, and we are having trouble getting the app approved. I feel like Facebook's app approval process is a constantly moving target and their explanations are provide the least amount of detail possible, leaving the door open for further rejections.
We are using a Facebook app to provide sharing functionality for products that are behind a paywall. All of our share buttons are custom, so they fit in our designs (we don't want to use the out of the box buttons). We first built the app attempting to use the recommended share dialog with open graph actions and stories. The problem here is that you can only use the share dialog with a shared link. Facebook reads any open graph tags on the page to provide sharing information, but because there are many different "products" on a given page, we can't use open graph tags. Because of our environment, we couldn't use the actions or stories. Furthermore, we'd like to customize that share information, so using share dialog is not an option.
Unfortunately, we had left our open graph stories and actions in our app when we first attempted approval. In our first denial, Facebook told us that we had implemented our open graph actions and stories incorrectly. We were not using the share dialog, but the 'feed' method, which is deprecated in 2.0 but still works. Thinking that Facebook looked at our app and noticed we were not using those actions correctly, we figured if we removed those stories and actions from the app, Facebook would see our share method worked and approve us. Wrong.
We had built the share using the publish_actions permission, along with FB.login() and FB.ui(). Facebook denied us because our app did not need publish_actions. They recommended we use the share dialog which did not need login or permissions.
We removed the publish_actions permission and FB.login(). When we tested this, you could still login to Facebook and perform the share WITHOUT fb.login(). So we thought it was good to go. It was not; Facebook told us we needed to implement login(), even thought the docs say you don't need it.
Now we have reimplemented login() and are going to try to get it approved again, but I have a feeling it's going to get rejected due to the 'feed' method being deprecated.
So my questions are:
A) If you have a website providing a paid service, how do you allow your users to post to their feeds, using the newer share method, with data you'd like? Eg: "I just completed the Get Moving III workout at teamexos.com!" The post would contain no pics or links. If it had to, a link to teamexos.com would be ok.
B) How do paid sites provide open graph actions and stories? Do they have public links to their products? Do those products have their own individual pages, with their own open graph tags?
First of all, the feed dialog is not deprecated, at least not anymore. You do not need to get anything approved for it, and you certainly don´t need login: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/reference/feed-dialog/
But: Your example looks like an Open Graph story, you should consider taking a look at those: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/opengraph
Related
I would like to share a link on Facebook and make it show up on the Timelime as a map.
I have seen some apps like Runtastic are able to publish links as maps, by definining the map coordinates inside the html source of the link.
Ideally I would like to share such links using the simple Share Dialog, without implementing the full Facebook Login systems inside my Android and iOS apps.
But I found this written on the documentation:
To publish Open Graph stories with the Share dialog, you do not need
to implement Facebook Login or ask for additional permissions. For
more information, see Share Dialog.
If you create a custom sharing UI to publishing Open Graph stories,
you need to implement Facebook Login and request the publish_actions
permission from people using your app. This also means you need to
submit your app for review, see Login Review.
Does it mean that if you want to share custom Open Graph stories, you always need to implement Facebook Login on your mobile apps?
As far as i know, and as i understand it, it depends whether you want to share it from inside your app or not.
If you want to share it from inside your app, then yes, you'll need a login.
If you are ok with just giving the link over to the facebook app, then giving permissions is al you need, and then make the final post inside facebook, as you usually are logged in aready.
How to create the Open Graph Object is described in Facebooks API:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/opengraph/custom
And also is there another answer which could help you:
Using Facebook Open Graph Story with map attachment (GeoPoint)
I hope this helps you
I am looking for Like Button to be shown in my ios native app, users of that app have already connected to app via facebook account.
there are several questions related to Facebook Like Button on stackoverflow but those are not specific to authorized single facebook page of the app.
According to official doc of facebook, facebook pages can not be liked via built-in action o open graph api.
But want only one official facebook page of that app to be liked by user when he hits like button. i don't want user to navigate away from the app or login again in web view to like facebook page.
is it possible to like app's facebook page without promoting user to log in again in webveiw?
Edit
Findings
1. https://stackoverflow.com/a/5837036/1632984
2. Comment by wallacer
"the general consensus does seem to be that you can't like a page on behalf of the user, however I just had an ios game like a page on my behalf. Extreme Road Trip successfully manages to get you to like their own page. I wish I'd paid more attention when I did it now..." – wallacer
This still can't be done directly using the graph api ( to the best of my knowledge ). What you can do is open a webview to the page you want the user to like. If you're rewarding their liking your app or something, when they close the webview (you'll have to provide a close button), you can use the graph api to check whether they like your app page. As far as I can tell this is the best current solution - and seems to be the approach taken by mobile games.
That said, I haven't used Facebook SDK 3 yet, so there may be something in there that could help you.
It appears that Liking a page on behalf of a user is still impossible. I've glanced over the iOS SDK Reference, and it doesn't seem like there is a built in mechanism to like anything.
However, in reading one of the other posts you linked to, and remembering that Facebook opened up the Like open graph action so app developers could allow their users to like content generated by their application...I found this link about built-in-actions (likes).
According to that link, you can post Like actions to your users by POSTing to https://graph.facebook.com/<user_id>/og.likes with the POST params for object (the open graph object URL you want to like on behalf of the user in this case your page's url. eg. www.facebook.com/yourpage) and access_token (obviously, for your user).
I'm not totally convinced that will work; though it is conceivable. My second thought would be to create an Open Graph Object for your page, and have all your users like that. Though, that is a little less ideal, as it removes the possibility of people finding your Page while they're on Facebook and would require you to put a lot more effort into getting likes for the Page via your website, application, etc.
I hope that helps a bit, good luck.
I'm using FB Open Graph in my application. It's not fully working. When I post a object it appears in the user's recent activity; however, it doesn't appear on their timeline. The metadata has no errors and I'm using the FBGraph gem but it also doesn't work when I do it using curl. Any advise to fix this?
Have you tried to use 'fb:explicitly_shared=true' in your URL. Refer: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/technical-guides/opengraph/explicit-sharing/
When you are in development mode, and your actions have not yet been approved by Facebook, the posted actions are only visible to you and to others with developer, admin or tester privileges for your FB app.
See: Facebook action submission
Also, open graph actions will no longer appear in users' news feeds or even the Ticker: http://developers.facebook.com/bugs/398546930211799/. So you shouldn't expect activities performed in your app to appear in users' timelines, unless these activities are tagged as 'explicitly shared', and even then there's no guarantee they'll show up.
Only direct, active shares are more or less guaranteed to show up in the Timeline.
Did you submit your action to get approved by facebook? If you did not do this, it will only work on your facebook account.
Also, are you sure you request the correct permission when the user authenticates, such as 'publish_stream'?
I'm a web developer and i'm having problems using the "like it" button
I put the buttom on my site as a counter of votes of a special contest. People can only click the like buttom if they are fan of my Facebook page.
The problem is that people can't vote if they haven't public permissions on his facebook, cause i can't know if they are or not fans of my page.
Is there a solution?
if you rely on information that you are not certain that you can obtain then sadly there is no solution.
Since what you are doing is beyond a simple like button What you may want to try is open a facebook application and request from your users the user_likes permission. You can read more about it here. I have photo albums on the "highest privacy setting" - only me. Yet when I request a list of my photo albums through one of my applications (with the required permissions of course) I get back ALL of my albums.. This might have been a temporary issue that was solved - but in any case - I saw this behavior and I thought it might be relevant to this post :)
Additionally you should look at the Promotions Guidelines specifically this point :
You must not use Facebook features or functionality as a promotion’s registration or entry mechanism. For example, the act of liking a Page or checking in to a Place cannot automatically register or enter a promotion participant.
I had some problems with facebook on this issue - you are not allowed to require someone to "like" a page in order to participate in an activity that is not directly connected to that page.
From what I understand you are requireing people to like your page on facebook beofore voting on your site... If this IS the case then facebook might very well start taking action and closing your page/app.
I'm trying to get a user to 'Like' a page via the SDK. User is signed in and I get a valid access tokken form the cookie. My APP has asked for permissions read_stream and publish_stream. I can successfully do things like post to their wall, etc. But when my APP tries to 'Like' a page, I get the error back:
OAuthException: (#3) Application does not have the capability to make this API call.
Am I missing some other permission, or is there a setting I have to turn on in my APP? I'm at a loss here.
You can't like a Page on behalf of a user (Bugzilla discussion). You can, however, like posts, comments, and photos on behalf of a user.
Edit 7/9/2012
Since bugzilla no long exists, the bug linked above is inaccessible. Google doesn't have a cached version of the page, so I ran another search. The best thing I could come up with was this Google Code Discussion regarding the ActionScript API.
Facebook makes brief mention of Publishing likes via the Graph API in the documentation, but doesn't say one way or another whether you can like a Page on behalf of a user - just "Objects" which (probably arguably) are not "objects" in Facebook-lingo.
My thought is, the API to like page is available, but is only offered to white listed applications (such as, the Facebook iOS and Android applications) written by "special" publishers. There's obvious reasons why Facebook wouldn't want/allow developers to create like connections on the graph. It would be taken advantage of by spammers and other nefarious developers and would deteriorate the meaning of what a "like" represents for a page on Facebook.
My guess is, you'd have to make a pretty strong case to Facebook about why you need/want access to the Page's Like connection (for publishing) before they'd even consider giving you access. I'd also guess that they'd want to verify that you're doing only user initiated like creations (in such a way that the iOS application would handle it) so as to protect the reptutation/meaning of a "like" action.
Actually this is NOT true, but you have to do a complicated Javascript / UIWebView process in order to display a Facebook 'page' of JUST the like button on your view, and this like button you can configure in the JavaScript / Objective-C (using string replacement) to be any Facebook page url you like.
Facebook's platform policies don't allow for a web-based like button aside from using the officially supported options
Those options doesn't require using OAuth or the Open Graph api. However, facebook just added support for mobile apps to send like actions through opengraph.
I'm not sure if they intend to allow sites to customize their like buttons or just apps...
Liking works for me with the iOS SDK using the graph api:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/actions/builtin/likes/