I need to constantly poll for all posts that a group have people have posted mentioning a specific Facebook page. I have a user which has admin privileges to that page but is currently not friends with the group of people I need to poll. I need to do this as authenticating through my Facebook app without having people constantly enter their password. My understanding is that there is no way to do this without becoming friends with the entire group of people. Is that true?
Is it even possible to do this with becoming friends with the entire group of people (assuming that the group let's my user see their posts)? Will the group need to authenticate to my app at any point? What permissions does my app need?
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My latest project has (had) a requirement for the user to invite their friends to their online service. I discovered that, apparently, as of April 2015 with the new v2.0+ Facebook Graph API, you cannot actually get a list of friends for the user, unless those friends are already subscribed members of your app.
The scenario:
My app is a web service that lets the user collaborate on research work in a private group online. The user needs to
look up their list of friends,
set permissions their friend will have in the group, and
send them an invitation both join the service, and the specific group. (using a unique, one-time use link tied to each recipient)
The user would (ideally) receive an invitation with a specific link for them to not just become a subscriber of said online app, but specifically to join the group they were invited to (i.e. not just a generic "hey, check out this app" type of invitation).
The expectation:
The user doesn't care whether their friend is already a member of "MyApp.com". They expect to simply look up their friends just like they do today from their phone when they connect it to Facebook (makes all contacts available, regardless of whether those friends connected their Facebook to their phone, respectively). Likewise, compare inviting members to your Google docs, for example: look up your contact, set permission, send invite - so easy. Users demand this UX simplicity today and do not distinguish or care whether they are dealing with email, Facebook, Twitter contacts, whatever.
The problem:
The entire point of a social network is to be, well, social. If the Graph API only lets my app access friends that are ALREADY users of my app, it completely defeats the entire purpose - it cuts my user off at the knees, kills UX, no more ability to actually contact their own friends. My understanding is Facebook made this change to prevent developers from spamming users, and I get that, I completely support that. HOWEVER, my company and my app are not the ones that are trying to invite friends for it's own purposes, it is the USER and THEIR OWN friends that THEY have the right to access and converse with for their purposes (or so you'd think). Beyond just friends list, even if I had that, I think there are additional hurdles and limitations with posting messages to friends, even private (not wall) messages, which again would be anti-social.
The Question:
Am I understanding Facebook limitations properly, and if so, what is the work-around? I'd be ok with such an API being locked down until you pass a review that proves you aren't spamming users, but I did not see such an option.
Facebook supposedly prioritizes users over developers, and these changes were made because if the user is not comfortable with privacy (don't spam my friends), then they wont be users any longer, and that obviously affects developers and Facebook. OK, but did they not realize that by locking it down this extreme just killed UX for the user in legitimate scenarios? And to my original point, not just a little, but paramount - the result quite literally is that on April 30, 2015, Facebook became anti-social. Surely this is not inline with their mission. Surely there is a better approach.
If your app is not a game (which I assume), the only viable option would be the Message Dialog as desribed at
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/faq#friend_invite
If your app is not a game and has a mobile or web presence:
You can also use the Message Dialog on iOS and Android, or the Send Dialog on Web. These products let a person send a message directly to their friends containing a link to your app. This type of message is a great channel for communicating with a smaller number of people in a direct way. The Message Dialog and the Send Dialog both include a typeahead which lets the person easily select a number of friends to receive the invite.
You might also find App Invites useful but I beleive it's only for iOS and Android apps and might not exactly fit your use case:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/app-invites
App Invites are a content-rich, personal way for people to invite
their Facebook friends to a mobile app.
I have a facebook group for ex-students that finished my university course. We plan on getting all of the user's locations and plot that data into a world map, so we can promote the course.
Will I be able to get user's locations as a group administrator, even if I'm not a direct friend of some of the members?
If this is not possible what do you recommend? An app that asks for permissions upon entering would solve this, but it really makes sense to keep this as a group for the user interaction.
Thank you in advance.
Will I be able to get user's locations as a group administrator, even if I'm not a direct friend of some of the members?
Of course not. (And no, even if you are their friend, you will at most get it by visiting each of their profiles directly.)
Outside of the context of browsing facebook.com directly, Facebook only gives away the location for the current user of an app, and only if that user gives the app permission to read that information before.
Whether or not the user has marked this info as “public” does not matter – this setting only applies to what other users get to see when they browse facebook.com, not what an app is able to access.
I'm working on a Facebook app that requires a few basic permissions (email, birthday, etc) as well as publish_actions (so I can create stories about user interaction).
When I ask for these permissions, the end user is presented with one screen for the basic permissions and yet another for the publish_actions permission.
However, when I looked at the following app from Amazon:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/socialmedia/promotions/SprngSweep
When I click on the enter button, I am redirected to Facebook to ask for permissions (as expected), however, they have all their permissions one page (Amazon would like to access your public profile, friend list, email address, birthday, photos, videos, personal description, likes and your friends' birthdays and likes. Amazon would like to post on your behalf. Amazon would like to access your data at any time.)
I can't add a picture due to lack of rep
The url that I'm redirect to is this:
https://www.facebook.com/dialog/oauth?client_id=164734381262&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.co.uk%2Fgp%2Fsocialmedia%2Ffbr%2Fconnect-handler.html%2Fref%3Dfbr_hn_SprngSweep%3Fie%3DUTF8%26appName%3DAmazon%26externalApp%3DKindle%26onSuccess%3D%252Fgp%252Fsocialmedia%252Fpromotions%252FSprngSweep%253Fie%253DUTF8%2526sm-sweeps_submit%253D1%2526sm-sweeps_submit.x%253D66%2526sm-sweeps_submit.y%253D20%2526sweepsConnect%253D1%2526sweepsEligibility%253D1%26ref%3DSprngSweep%26token%3D6CBF36BD25311891B2F205333EFA3AA78E561AB9&scope=
While attempting to investigate this myself, I noticed that they aren't even passing a value for scope in the url.
How the hell are they doing this?
Most likely they are using an old API (FB changed the behavior over there recently, read their blogs please) or they are using hidden features which FB created for them (as this has an impact on there advertising revenue obviously, and even these guys are "coin operated").
The "two pager" is normal, FB API and FB advertising API quit the same. I wouldn't worry.
I'm new to programming Facebook apps but I think I have the general idea down. I'm creating an app that allows users to sign up and select friends to automatically send a birthday message on their birthdays. I know how to grab users and their birthdays, but how do I go about going through my database everyday, grabbing the birthdays and friends, and posting to their walls? I imagine it would take a cron job of sorts but how do I get around the permissions this way? Also, I want to post from the app, not my user account. Do I need to create a user account just for the app?
Thanks all.
You need the extended permissions offline_access and publish_stream to do what you are proposing.
Also research Facebook Platform Policies regarding prohibited actions such as filling the user message parameter, and how Facebook monitors user feedback to automatically ban applications that receive too many hides, blocks, spam reports, etc. Apps that abuse publish_stream and offline_access get shut down very quickly.
You do not need a user account just for the app.
And yes you need a way to run your program on a schedule if you don't want to have to remember to run it yourself every day. a cron job, a Windows Scheduled Task, or other scheduler will be required.
My app stores the Facebook Access Token for offline use. The main purpose of the app is to allow users to automatically posts on the walls of people within a specified number of days of their friends birthday.
My app has been blocked by Facebook due to spam (some users are sending marketing messages to their friends instead of using the app for it's purpose).
I want to find out who those users are and block their access to my application. The only problem is that my Facebook App has a few hundred access tokens (one for each user of my application). The insights dashboard does not provide me with stats per access token. I need to find out which of my users are getting their wall posts reported as spam.
Is there any way of doing this?
After appealing, Facebook has unblocked my application but I don't want it to happen again. As far as I can tell, I can find out the number of people who have reported the wall posts as spam...but I don't know which access token made those posts...and hence don't know which of my users is posting spam messages.
It's not Facebook job to keep track of your application internal activities. You should be logging every activity, at least posts ids returned when someone posts anything on their friends' wall.
And one more time... you DON'T need the offline_access permission to publish something when the user is offline!