prevent duplicate publishing of watch action on facebook - facebook

I have successfully implemented Facebook watch action on my website. The problem is that every time I open a particular video, depending on how many times I do it, it records each of these as separate watch actions. I would like to record the watch action only once for each unique video. How would I go about doing this?

1) Check in your own database to see if you've already published that action against that object and simply don't post it twice - you'll already be logging this because it's necessary to store the action instance IDs to remove the watch actions later if the user requests you to
2) Set the action as unique in the OG settings for the action. This may not apply to built-in actions, i'm not 100% sure, but in the general case you can mark an action as 'unique' and it'll only be possible to publish once per action/object combo for a user

Related

How can I trigger custom emails to be sent in wordpress?

My goal is to use a user's answers to a few questions to trigger custom emails being sent to them with filtered content on my wordpress website. It seems like this is a common need, but can't find anything that allows it, or even is the right base to build a custom solution.
There are 3 main features I'm needing to do: First, the signup form lets users choose a few criteria via selection boxes.
Next, the captured information triggers an email being sent that matches the content they chose. For example, if the user says they're interested in waterskiing, the email that is auto sent would show the most recent posts in the water-skiing category.
Finally, the user responses would need to be saved to trigger actions at a later time if the content is not available yet. So for example, if they are interested in bowling, but there are no entries on bowling, nothing happens. However, once a post gets entered in this category, they are automatically emailed with that recent entry.
Any clarity you can provide here on plugins, software, etc that would lend to this functionality is much appreciated!!

Unable to communicate instructions for action resubmit that was already approved

My action was approved with Action Tagging. However after some time, I got a message that action tagging is not valid for my app and to consider using mention tagging. Currently the status is:
Approval Status: Available to users (changes needed) This Action Type
is available to all users, but your most recent submission needs
changes.
Capabilities Status:
User Messages (Live) - Allow users to write a personalized message attached to this action.
Tags (Needs Change) - Allow users of my app to tag other users for this action.
Explicitly Shared (Live) - This action can specify the user explicitly shared an action.
So I implemented mention tagging, but each time I re-submit, I get the following response:
We are unable to tell which additional properties you are requesting.
Please specify if you are planning to implement action tagging,
mention tagging, or both. If you are requesting mention tagging you
must select both the user message and tags action properties when
submitting your action. If you are requesting both action tagging and
mention tagging we will need to be able to reproduce both action
properties. For further information, please see here:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/submission_criteria/action_properties/#mentiontagging
Of course on resubmitting I explain very clearly that I want mention tagging and I show the steps to reproduce. I also have selected both the user message and tags action properties. It just seems that the testers simply ignore the message I write in the re-submit dialog.
I also puzzles me that the re-submit dialog has only the first step that you type in how to reproduce the action. It lacks the extra edit boxes that the normal submit dialog had the first time where you explained about the additional properties.
Maybe some kind of bug in the resubmit dialog of an already approved action (that needs changes in the additional properties) does not allow me to write the message I need?

Auto-delete after a certain date

I'm looking to use Soundcloud to promote some upcoming events - I'll have a separate sound file promoting each event. I'd like the soundfiles to auto-delete once the events have happened. Is there a way of setting a Kill Date field so that after a certain date, the sound file will delete.
You could certainly use the API to delete these tracks using whatever logic you need, but there's no feature built-in to SoundCloud to do this automatically.
Here is the documentation for the API: http://developers.soundcloud.com/docs/api/reference#tracks
You'd have to be authenticated (obviously), and then send a DELETE request to /tracks/{id}

Is it possible to save a custom variable for each user on their account?

I just got starte with programming a Facebook app. I already wrote an app for the VZ-Network, and there they have something called 'Persistant Storage'. Basically its an environment where you can save custom data on each user account. With your app you can read this data from the current user as well as from the users friends. Now I want to port my app to Facebook and my problem is that I didn't find such functionality here yet.
For now I would like to finish and launch this as soon as possible, so it would be nice if I could c&p as much of the code as possible.
Since the data is contains information about participation, at some point I would like to use the Facebook event object. But I was wondering if that could cause problems since it would require to create those events publically in order to use them in my app. Couldn't that lead to legal problems when I create such events with those who actually host the events in the real world? Would I have to ask the hosts to create those events, could I automate this process, or in case they don't have a Facebook account ask them to approve that the app creates the event for them?
I also need to know in what events the users friends participate, so I can't simply save the information on my server, since I don't have the friend info there.
In any case, it seems much easier to me to simply use a list of EventIDs on each user account to check whether or not the user participates in an event.

Form Journey Tracking using google analytics

Is there anyway, using google analytics, to track a user's journey/selections through a long form so I can see where they drop off?
I've created a 'contact us' form which starts with drop down menu which requires the user to make a choice i.e. apply for job, apply for funding etc. and then each option requires the user to fill out a form, which is completed over serval steps.
Is there a way to track a user's individual form choices from their initial selection on the Contact Us page through to the form being submitted? That way I could see where in the form journey the users are dropping off.
If the form is a multi-page form, then you can use Goal Funnel tracking to obtain reports which will help you understand how users fail to complete the form:
http://www.google.co.uk/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en-uk&answer=55515
The Regular Expression matching in Goal Funnels is quite useful if you have different paths or different form URLs for the same goal. You could also track multiple page views per actual URL, if you wanted to monitor the users who move onto a different step on a single URL.
If you need to analyze how users complete a particular form, you could use Event Tracking to record when each field is completed. You will need to carefully think about how you wish to use Event Tracking to obtain the information you require.
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/eventTrackerGuide.html
But Google Analytics is not good at tracking individual users' behavior. You may wish to take a look at ClickTale if you want to do more advanced form usage analysis.