I recently created a Facebook custom tab for a organization page and followed all the developer's instructions. I have a secure site, made sure all the dimensions are correct, etc.
For some reason, the tab shows up completely blank, no content. Sometimes it simply has the words "I am a teapot", which I found out was an error code...What does this error mean and how do I fix it???
See, your actual url to the application that is hosted on some domain, should be SSL certified.
Eg: If your url was http://my-app.com, then https://my-app.com must also work, else it will not be published to the facebook!
Related
The problem i have is that i own a website where other people can post stuff ,creating new pages on my domain, but the problem that occured today is that all the new post pages created today are malfunctioning , sharing is not loading thumbnail picture and title and so on, but the weird this is that all the posts(new pages) created before today are all working fine
What caused an error to occur out of nowhere?
I also cannot debug any of the URL's of my website as the same error: Error parsing input URL, no data was scraped
The website im having problems with is here http://www.vabameedia.ee/vm/184/h%C3%A4da-ei-anna-h%C3%A4beneda.html
This is one of the sites where it says no error on page but facebook still cant reach it. http://www.vabameedia.ee/vm/178/craig-parks-%C3%BChek%C3%A4eline-krossisoitja.html
For people experiencing the same problem but for different causes, I discovered a few interesting things about how Facebook "scrapes" pages, checking the logs of the server while doing some trials.
First of all: if you never tried to share a page with FB, FB never tried to scrape it, and it will not try to do so if you only put the url in the Debug tool.
That's the first reason because you get the error: it just states that FB has no information on the page, you must "force" it to scrape the page.
The first time you try to share a page, FB scrapes it (asks your server the first 40k of the page and analyse the opengraph tags).
What can happen is that you do not see the image: Facebook Share Dialog does not display thumbnails one first load
The reason is that FB behind the scenes is still scraping your page and caching the image. The next time, in fact, you have also the image.
How to solve it? Pre caching: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/best-practices#precaching
or simply add
<meta property="og:image:width" content="450"/>
<meta property="og:image:height" content="298"/>
I was pulling my hair out trying to fix this issue. Hours and hours of troubleshooting to no avail. After speaking with one of our programmers about a topic unrelated I thought of something to try as a long shot.
Much to my surprise, it worked!!!
This is the reason behind the problem and my solution for it:
When you draft a post in WordPress it generates a link based on your article's title (unless you manually change it). The title of my article included special characters, however the auto-generated link didn't display these special characters, only hyphens to replace the spaces. Should be fine right? Wrong! Somewhere embedded in metadata and code in the WordPress platform are those special characters and they mess up the way Facebook pulls info from the article being linked to. This is a problem because certain special characters invalidate hyperlinks.
For example:
Article Title: R[eloaded]
Auto-generated hyperlink DISPLAYED in WordPress "Permalink" field: http://www.example.com/reloaded
Actual WordPress Auto-generated hyperlink: http://www.example.com/r[eloaded]
Those brackets will invalidate the link and Facebook will be unable to pull any information (ie pictures) from it.
Solution:
(1) Simply, manually change the WordPress hyperlink address to something that doesn't include any special characters (this will not change the title of your article).
(2) Click "Update" to change the post to include the new hyperlink.
(3) Click "Purge from Cache" in the WordPress window
(4) Refresh your Facebook browser window
(5) Paste the new hyperlink for your article
(6) Enjoy your Facebook post with a preview image and information
Sidenote: Don't pull your hair out over Facebook, it's not worth it. =)
If you're using Wordpress, edit the post in question to change the permalink (just alter it slightly), then update the post. Using the new permalink in the Facebook OG debugger should now work.
It's a weird fix, but I think it takes care of a problem caused by special characters being used in the title of a post, which is then used to make the permalink.
Its all about DNS issue, was having same issue and resolved it by updating domain name servers to actual name servers.
In my case my domain was pointed to ns1.websterz.net and ns2.websterz.net and on this server i had DNS redirect to my other server (where web site is hosted). I Just updated name servers of the domain to actual name servers where my web site is hosted on. This was account migration case i forgot to update name servers as of new server.
Everything works fine now.
I am trying to set up a tab with a link to a contact form from my site on Facebook.
I developed the 'app' through the developers site and have set up the page tab.
I've saved the app and it saves it fine (displaying a message saying changes were saved but it might take some time to propagate across all servers.)
Well I waited an hour and I still can't add the tab to my page. I tried locating the app page directly using the namespace, but I get an error message saying:
"[My App] cannot be displayed because the app is misconfigured."
I don't know how it is misconfigured? There are no errors when saving, so I don't know what the issue is or how to go about fixing it. There are no problems with the app that I can see... how am I supposed to know what's wrong with it?
All it is is a page tab. I've put the link to the page tab in, I don't have a secure page (https) so I have left this box blank but I don't know what to do now.
Any ideas how I can find out in what way it is 'misconfigured'?
This error usually occurs when you try to view the App Center page for the app when the app doesn't have the 'App Details' tab settings populated.
So instead of:
https://www.facebook.com/appcenter/APP_NAMESPACE
Make sure you are loading:
https://apps.facebook.com/APP_NAMESPACE
That page will display hints (if you are admin or developer of the app) on what you are missing.
And, adding to the answer already given by #Donn Lee, which pointed to the right way, you must also ADD A PLATFORM in settings, in https://developers.facebook.com/apps/APP-ID/settings/
We are developing an app that makes posts on behalf of our users to Facebook. Within those posts, we want to put links to external (non-Facebook) websites.
Looking at the links in the status bar of the browser (usually Chrome), the correct URL is displayed. However, Facebook seems to wrap the actually-clicked link into some extra bells-and-whistles. Usually, this works correctly.
Sometimes, however, this URL wrapping ends up sending the click to a URL like:
http: //spywaresite.info/0/go.php?sid=2
(added space to make it non-browsable!) which generates Chromes severe warning message:
This happens very occasionally on Chrome, but very much more often in the iOS browser on the iPhone.
Does anyone have any pointers as to how to deal with this?
EDIT
For example, the URLs we put in the link is
http://www.example.com/some/full/path/somewhere
but the URL that actually gets clicked is:
http://platform.ak.fbcdn.net/www/app_full_proxy.php?app=374274329267054&v=1&size=z&cksum=fc1c17ed464a92bc53caae79e5413481&src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fsome%2Ffull%2Fpath%2Fsomewhere
There seems to be some JavaScript goodness in the page that unscrambles that and usually redirects correctly.
EDIT2
The links above are put on the image and the blue text to the right of the image in the screenshot below.
Mousing over the links (or the image) in the browser shows the correct link. Right-clicking on the link and selecting "Copy Link Address" gets the fbcdn.net link above (or one like it). Actually clicking on the link seems to set off some JavaScript processing of the fbcdn.net link into the right one... but sometimes that processing fails.
I'm not 100% sure what you're asking here, but i'll tell you what I know:- are you referring to this screen on Facebook?
(or rather, the variation of that screen which doesn't allow clickthrough?)
If you manually send a user to facebook.com/l.php?u=something they'll always see that message - it's a measure to prevent an open redirector
if your users are submitting such links, including the l.php link, you'll need to extract the destination URL (in the 'u' parameter)
If you're seeing the l.php URLs come back from the API this is probably a bug.
If links clicked on facebook.com end up on the screen it's because facebook have detected the link as suspicious (e.g. for URL redirector sites - the screen will allow clickthrough but warn the user first) or malicious/spammy (will not allow clickthrough)
In your app you won't be able to post links to the latter (an error will come back saying the URL is blocked), and the former may throw a captcha sometimes (if you're using the Feed dialog, this should be transparent to the app code, the user will enter the captcha and the dialog will return as normal)
If this isn't exactly what you were asking about please clarify and i'll update my answer
Rather than add to the question, I thought I'd put more details here.
It looks like the Facebook mention in the original title was mis-directed, so I've removed it.
We still haven't got to the bottom of the issue.
However, we used both Wireshark and Fiddler to look at the HTTP traffic between the Chrome browser (on the PC) and Facebook. Both showed that Facebook was returning the correct URL refresh.
Here's what Wireshark showed:
What we saw on Fiddler was that our server is issuing a redirect to the spywaresite.info site:
We are working with our ISP to figure out what is happening here.
I have just created a new facebook application to use in a page tab. When I check for the signed_request it is empty.
So I checked another app that I have done in the past. It is on the same server and the only difference in the setup is the dir name.
http://example.com/app1/ works
and
http://example.com/app2/ doesn't
So I tried swapping the tab URLs in the apps over and app1 still works with app2s URL.
This lead me to believe there must be a problem with the way I have set up the application.
So I went through all the settings and made sure they were the same. They all are, except there are 2 that are not available on the app I just setup. They are "Encrypted Access Token" and "Requests 2.0 efficient" neither of which seem to relate to the problem.
I seem to remember in the past there was an option to pass through the signed request to canvas page, but I can no longer find it.
Has signed request been deprecated? I couldn't see any mention of that in the docs.
Any help/comment appreciated. Otherwise I am going to have to go back and re-use old apps with new content in them, and I only have about 15 more before I run out.
Cheers
Alex
No, it wasn't deprecated.
There can be 2 issues that could cause this
You must have a trailing slash or a specific file on your page tab url.
http://myapp.com/app/
http://myapp.com/app/index.php
Your server for the second app is redirecting the request which causes it to lose the POST variables.
You should check if there aren't any redirects which usually occur form mod_rewrite. (.htaccess and such)
This seems to have been resolved now, I can no longer replicate it with new applications.
I'm working on a Facebook app tab and would like to use the signed request bundle as documented here:
http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/462/
I'm trying to use their example code to unpackage the signed request which is supposedly passed to the tab, however, $_POST, $_GET, and $_REQUEST are always all empty.
The exact code works on the canvas page and I am able to parse the signed request.
Is there something that I'm missing in their recent announcement?
By the way, the app is not published to the marketplace, and the fanpage my tab is installed on is private. Will that make a difference?
-Seth
Okay, figured it out!
When configuring the app, I had filled in the "Tab URL" to be "tab/"
This made the full url to the tab page "http://www.example.com/myfacebookapp/tab/"
This made sense to me.
Apparently, Facebook doesn't like this. After changing my "Tab URL" to 'tab/index.php", the signed request started to show up in the app tab!
Essentially, the problem is that your webserver is performing a redirect when it receives the request. In your case, it's redirecting from http://www.example.com/myfacebookapp/tab/ to http://www.example.com/myfacebookapp/tab/index.php; in my case it was redirecting from http://www.example.com/myfacebookapp/tab to http://www.example.com/myfacebookapp/tab/ (my app is built in .Net MVC, so has no filenames, but needs that trailing slash, apparently).
So the canonical solution is to make sure that the path in the Tab URL field is the actual URL, not one that the webserver will redirect to. If the webserver has to make a redirect, then the real page is fetched by GET (not POST) and no signed_request postdata is provided to your script.
Very frustrating; I just spend an hour and a half debugging why my test app worked and the production one didn't. To make things worse, I knew this answer, it just didn't register that this was what the problem was. Very irritating!
Thanks Seth I was having the same problem. I could get a signed request on the app canvas page but not of my page tab. For clarification
go to www.facebook.com/developers/
click on edit settings for your app
click the Facebook Integration tab
at the bottom in the Page Tabs section in the Tab URL field enter in the path to the index.php page for your facebook landing page
ex. if your page is located at www.foobar.com/facebook/tab/index.php you need to put "tab/index.php" (without the quotes) rather than just "tab/"
Been trying to figure this out for days!
I found a solution:
Just put a "/" at the end of the tab url.
Like: "http://domain.us/facebook/tab/"
It worked for me, let us know if it also works for you!
Once you are Authenticate with Application you will get the signed_request data,
Authenticated as like in the below URLs
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/javascript/FB.login/