Like button (iframe / like.php plugin) of our Facebook app is broken for some days.
We have choose to use "http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=APP_ID" url instead of "http://apps.facebook.com/APP_NAME/" format (maybe not a good idea).
A click on it leads to a failure (popup telling "There was an error liking the page. If you are the page owner, please try running your page through the linter on the Facebook devsite (https://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint/) and fixing any errors.")
Linter is able to find that http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=APP_ID must be converted to "Final URL : http://apps.facebook.com/APP_NAME/"
Redirect Path section says "Final URL is in bold (this is the URL we tried to extract metadata from)" and final URL is correct (http://apps.facebook.com/APP_NAME)
But in this case, linter is not able to scrap Open Tags included into "http://apps.facebook.com/APP_NAME" despite the fact that open tags are well recognized if final URL "http://apps.facebook.com/APP_NAME" is directly submitted to linter.
It seems that open graph tags of final url are no more used.
Can someone confirm me that this a new behaviour/bug and tell how to solve it ?
Could I migrate our likes from one url (.../apps/application.php?id=APP_ID) to a new one that works (.../APP_NAME/) ?
Many thanks
Those /apps/application.php URLs were deprecated in December 2011 and removed in February 2012 - you shouldn't still be using them, they automatically redirect to the app's canvas or website URL. Like buttons may have given some semblance of still working on those URLs for a few months afterwards, but effectively anyone clicking them was becoming a fan of nothing
Your like button or Like Box should be pointing to the Page for your app if you have one. That blog post has instructions for creating one if you didn't migrate between December 2011 and February 2011
If you don't have a page for your app, there's no purpose to accumulating fans via the Like button as you can't target ads to them or send them updates.
There's instructions for creating a Page in the blog post i linked above, or in the Communicating with your users doc.
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.
After searching the internet and doing my own research on this subject I still can not find the answer to my problem, so here it is.
When I click the like button (to like my website http://openarchitecture.cz) then the like count is not being increased.
Debugging the FB javascript code on client-side (in Chrome) and examining the ajax response
send back from FB servers after the click on "Like" button, revealed that FB is instructing the Like button to be "disconnected", resulting in the behaviour described below.
The term "disconnected" is a strict FB term (in a sense of a javascript code), it means that on client-side there will be used a "plugin" that will perform certain operations leading to "inactivity" of like button. Technically, when the plugin "disconnect" is beeing recognized as part of the ajax response, there is an array of predefind actions (functions) that will be followed and called sequentially.
Now for the reproducibility of the problem.
Go to http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like and fill the "URL to Like" field with http://openarchitecture.cz
url.
Click "Get code", then click "Ok" on the pop-up and finally click "Like" button on the right.
The like count should increase. Instead a pop-up shows up for (aprox.) 1 sec.
then the popup disappears. Now I am in the same state as before I click the
like button, i.e. like count is not increased.
I have found similar questions here on SO, but none of them seems to finally
resolve the issue.
The related questions here on SO are:
1. http://facebook.stackoverflow.com/questions/5195183/facebook-like-button-flashing-on-then-off/12958474#12958474
2. Facebook Like button does not work on one website?
One of the suggestions was that this migth actually be a FB bug. I found a (very recently created) bug, reported in FB bug tracking system. The bug is located here:
http://developers.facebook.com/bugs/268340209965207?browse=search_512b8e0bed9724580954683
The bug has however "Low" priority an so far it does not seem to be resolved (it might even be returned as not a FB issue, I am not sure if this possibility is still open).
So for all interested in this.
Is this a real FB bug ?
How have you dealt with this ?
Could it be that my site is for some reason on FB spam/black/"whatever nasty" list ?
Well. This will end up like the other posts, i.e. no lesson learned here.
[The term "page" used later in this post represents the http://openarchitecture.cz page]
I just tried today to like the page again via the FB generated like button (on http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/ ) and the result is now ok. So the like count gets increased after clicking the like button.
The difference that I observed when checking the request exchange to FB servers is that this time the communication has been done (by default. i.e. using the XFBML version of the like button) over iframe, not direct ajax call (as was in the past for XFBML).
I dont know what was the cause (I tried the pure iframe version of like button before) but the response going back as a result of the mentioned iframe request is now correct, ie. FB sends back response instructing javascript in client browser to use "connect" plugin not "disconnect" plug-in.
One more thing. One month ago I have created a FB profile (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Openarchitecture/125515934292877) of the page and have done some updates to this profile. So maybe FB decided that the page (being referenced from FB profile) has now earned the provilige to be "liked".
Like I said at the beginning. Problem solved, but no lesson learned.
For me, the problem (Like popup disappearing after a second; "Plugin","disconnect" response) was happening when the Like button URL redirected to another URL.
The fix was to add og:type, og:url, and og:title (required per https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/opengraph/object-type/website), then running the URL through the Facebook debugger to clear the cache (https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug).
More at https://stackoverflow.com/a/16597060/2391566 .
I will try to explain a bit the context for my problem.
Context:
A while ago I started working on Facebook application. One of the requirements is to be included in a Facebook page as a tab. This application will contain on a page a send button in order to be able to make it more engaging with specific people, users of the application would choose on their own. The reason behind this is because the Facebook page containing the application is related to alcohol, and "liking" the application will get more audition and potential children. Another reason for using send button rather then other similar options from Facebook (like send dialog etc.) is because in Facebook documentation was stated that send button works on mobile devices and other options don't.
Problem:
My problem is related to the send button. What I need is to be able to completely configure the send button: url, image, title, description. I have research the open graph tags in order to be able to do this. Everything works fine if the page I want to be sent with the message is a website OUTSIDE Facebook. Once I started to use the url of a Facebook page (let's call it www.facebook.com/mycustompage), then the crawler takes the images, title, description from facebook.com ignoring the actual page and the produced message is not what I want.
I have searched a lot to better understand this limitation and could not find anything relevant.
The only article I could find as a potential solution was (and even this I had trouble finding):
Send button returning error codes, like button works fine
The above discussion is a workaround which I have already put in place but is not 100% what I want. The described workaround is about putting in the send button:
<div class="fb-send" data-href="http://www.mycustomdomain.com/og"></div>
a page that sniffs the user agent. In case the user agent is Facebook crawler to serve an html empty page just with the open graph tags, otherwise redirect to the desired URL - which in our case is the facebook page www.facebook.com/mycustompage.
The message produced contains:
the title which is a link to www.mycustomdomain.com/og which when
clicked opens a page in a new tab with the address
www.facebook.com/mycustompage - this is relatively ok
under the title I have a "sub-title" readonly text containing the domain of the link: www.mycustomdomain.com - THIS IS NOT OK since I don't want to share where I have hosted the application.
the image and the desired description - this is ok.
Conclusion:
What I want to know if there is a better way to do this rather than this workaround.
If not I would like to know how I can hide for the produced message the "sub-title" so that the hosted domain is not visible.
In trying to create an "object" page for my first facebook app, I've run into some difficulty. I followed Facebook's Open Graph Tutorial nearly exactly.
After creating an "object" html page with the appropriate <meta property="og:... tags I tried running the URL through the Debugger Tool as suggested in the tutorial but I'm given the following error:
"Facebook URLs aren't scrapable by this Debugger. Try your own."
This page is in the same directory on my company's linux box as the canvas page, and is certainly not a "Facebook URL". If it matters, I'm using an IP instead of a domain name: xx.x.x.xxx/app/obj.html
...
I continued the tutorial anyway, but ultimately it does not seem to want to post a new action/object (is this even right?). I did however manage to get something to work, as in the app timeline view I apparently actioned one of those objects a couple hours ago. I assume this happened when I was pasting curl POST commands into the terminal.
I'm pretty new to the whole open graph, and facebook APIs, etc., so I'm probably operating under false assumptions of some sort, and I've been all over trying different things, but this error seems pretty bizarre to me and I can't seem to resolve it.
UPDATE
I just took the object page and put it on my own personal shared hosting acct. The debugger worked (inexplicably) fine on it, but I couldn't go too far since it's a different domain than the one authorized by my app.
Make sure og:url inside your html page does not point to facebook.
Also, make sure to look at the open graph protocol page (to see you formatted the og tags correctly.
Also, make sure the page is accessible to everyone, not just yourself.
Without knowing the URL it's hard to be sure, but it's most likely that your URL is either including a og:url tag pointing to a facebook.com address, or a HTTP 301/302 redirect to Facebook instead
I've been reading guides and examples for a long time (hours) but I can't manage. I tried to use all html meta tag like title, description, and og:property. Also tried to use the link sharer and also to create a new blank page with just the info I want to share to facebook in order to test. Also I tried to generate an random url in php so to have always a different url variable (the url to share and also the url of the main page containing the script). I also grabbed (url linter) a lot of time the url to clean the cache of facebook. It always give me the title of the site domain as title or the url itself as the shared title and description. I don't know what to do.
The main web site is from joomla. In the code of index of joomla I put a php include if the url has the variable "articolo" id. This incuded php page has regulat head body etc. So maybe I facebook check the main meta of joomla first? So now I tried to open a popup with just the page for sharing. Look here: link
It's possible that the title is locked in, meaning that after X number of likes Facebook doesn't allow you to change it anymore. Can you give us an example URL you're having issues with?
EDIT
Ok, now the link you provided shows some very interesting output. http://modernolatina.it/wjs/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=96&Itemid=258&autore=6&articolo=6
First, you webserver, instead of sending back a 200 code, is sending back a 500 code.
Secondly the HTML your webserver is sending back has two HTML tags (Do a view source on the content returned)
Fix up those two issues and I think the linter will be happier with your page.
Test your page here:
http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug