With the Graph API, I publish a story by POSTing to the /me/feed connection. I get back a success or an error result from Facebook. So far so good. Once in a while, the API takes a long time and the connection times out. In that case, I don't know for sure if the request succeeded of failed (i.e. maybe the request never reached Facebook, or maybe it succeeded and the result never made it back to me). How do you handle this situation?
More details:
I publish a lot of posts to Facebook and Twitter, so the timeout situation happens often. With Twitter, the solution is easy. If the request times out the first time, I simply try again. Twitter detects duplicates, so if the post was successfully published the first time, then I'll get a "duplicate status" error on the second request and I know that I don't need to retry any more.
But Facebook doesn't detect duplicates, so if I retry the publish request, I risk having two copies of the post published to the user wall, which is not nice. On the other hand, if I don't retry, I risk having the post not published at all. Thoughts?
I get back a success or an error result from Facebook.
Hmmm. When I post to the Graph API, I get back an error or the id of the post. I never see any success message. What SDK are you using around the API?
Once in a while, the API takes a long time and the connection times
out.
Usually when things are running slowly, it's due to the channelUrl not being specified. See https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/javascript/
It is important for the channel file to be cached for as long as
possible. When serving this file, you must send valid Expires headers
with a long expiration period. This will ensure the channel file is
cached by the browser which is important for a smooth user experience.
Without proper caching, cross domain communication will become very
slow and users will suffer a severely degraded experience.
Related
We (a local hackerspace) have a Tumblr blog and wanted to make ourselves a Facebook page. Before going live we wanted to import all our Tumblr content to Facebook so our fans on Facebook can browse it here as well. For this I have made an app that reads all the posts from our Tumblr blog and publishes them to our new Facebook page (backdating those posts as well). Here's my problem: after the app does about ~130 re-posts (~260 operations: publish + backdate) I start getting an error:
Received Facebook error response of type OAuthException: It looks like you were misusing this feature by going too fast. You’ve been blocked from using it.
Learn more about blocks in the Help Center. (code 368, subcode 1390008)
The block is gone the next day, but after a similar amount of operations it's back. After a couple of hours later, when the block is gone again, I introduced 6 second delays between operations, but that didn't help and after 19 re-posts I'm blocked again. Some facts:
I am publishing posts to a feed of (yet) unpublished page I am the (only) owner of.
The app is a standalone JAVA application and uses restfb to work with Facebook.
The line that is causing the error: facebookClient.publish("me/feed", FacebookType.class, params.toArray(new Parameter[0]));
All publish operations contain a link, mostly to respective posts on out Tumblr. Some contain message, caption or a name (depending on post type).
I need to re-post ~900 posts from Tumblr, I have done ~250 so far. When over, I will likely put in on server, scheduled, to keep syncing single new posts.
This app is not meant to be used publicly, it is rather a personal utility (but the code will be posted to GitHub, should anybody need it).
This is my first experience with Facebook API and I wasn't able to find a place where I could officially address them with this question. I could proceed by doing 100 posts/day, but I'm afraid I will eventually get banned for good, even though I don't feel like doing anything wrong.
I haven't put any more code here, as the code itself does not seem to be a problem, but rather the rate at which it is executed.
So, should I proceed with 100 posts/day and hope I won't be banned, or is there another "correct" way of dealing with this?
Thanks in advance!
I'm answering a bit late but I just had this problem too so I did some research : it seems that besides the rate limits shown in Facebook docs, there's also a much more limited and opaque rate for POST requests to limit spam.
It's not clearly set but it could depend on your relationship to the page you're writing to (admin or not), if you post to multiple pages and finally if you post too quickly.
To answer the question, it seems that it would have been okay if you had done like 1 post per minute or less.
I think you exceed the rate limiting for your user Id.
- Your app can make 200 calls per hour per user in aggregate. As an
example, if your app has 100 users, this means that your app can make
20,000 calls. One user could make 19,000 of those calls and another
could make 1,000, so this isn't a per-user limit. It's a per-app
limit
- That hour is a sliding window, updated every few minutes
- If your app is rate limited, all calls for that app will be limited, not
just for a specific user
- The number of users your app has is the
average daily active users of your app, plus today's new logins
Check this: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/advanced/rate-limiting
It looks like you were misusing this feature by going too fast. You’ve been blocked from using it.
Learn more about blocks in the Help Center.
If you think you're seeing this by mistake, please let us know.
I am developing an App with the Facebook Custom Audiences API and my match rate is 0% despite a successful response message. I go through each step the same way it is in their documents but none ever match.
First I create the audience through the API, and then add I add a description with the API, both of those work. I even get a successful response when I submit array of email addresses:
{"audience_id":"XXX","num_received":460,"num_invalid_entries":0,"invalid_entry_samples":[]}"
But when I look at the audience in facebook, the audience has the error message "Not ready audience too small." I figured this must be an issue with my hashing steps, which I had copied directly from their documentation. I submitted their example email "mary#example.com" into my app
Facebook example hash: f1904cf1a9d73a55fa5de0ac823c4403ded71afd4c3248d00bdcd0866552bb79
My app's hash value : f1904cf1a9d73a55fa5de0ac823c4403ded71afd4c3248d00bdcd0866552bb79
I even entered the test email address into my app multiple times, so position in the array has nothing to do with the hashing.
My final test was to upload the list manually, to see if there are in fact zero matches. There were 100 matches almost immediately. what gives?
Is there any reason for me to get a successful response besides issues with the hashing?
I'd say the issue was Facebook returning a "success" message because it received the hashed values successfully and can process those hashes without issue. This doesn't imply that the matching is done on Facebook's end or that they got matches.
Rather than have your connection wait while it processes your hashes, Facebook will just make sure everything's OK, return that success message, and then process the hashes offline. This means it could take some time for the hashes to be matched to Facebook users. Oftentimes it's pretty quick, but I've seen it take hours sometimes.
Facebook's audience management API documentation states that it could take up to an hour to add someone to an audience. That applies to each batch of hashes you're sending (since each batch is limited to 10,000 hashes).
Regarding this API: https://developers.google.com/admin-sdk/email-audit/#accessing_account_information
I have been using the Admin SDK to retrieve login history for users in our Google Apps for Business setup. When I request individual users at a time, the request sometimes takes a few hours to process (in which the state is PENDING). However, when those few hours pass, I still get the login history that I need.
The problem continues as I begin requesting more users. We have around 750 users, and of those 750~ requests I made, 725 gave me an error after waiting ONE WEEK for my requests to be processed. Even worse, the ones that did not error out are still pending! Here is the response I get when I check the status of a request that errored out:
{'status': 'ERROR', 'adminEmailAddress': '***#etsy.com', 'requestDate': '***', 'requestId': '***', 'userEmailAddress': '***#etsy.com'}
This has got to be the flakiest and most unreliable API I have ever been unfortunate enough to work with. Requests can take anywhere from an hour to over a week to process, with no indicator of success in the mean time. Errors can also happen for no apparent reason, and no messages or explanations as to why.
It looks like this issue has been resolved by the Google Engineers. Try to run the calls again. It shouldn't be in pending more than the "normal" expected time. I just tried earlier, and I was able to export login info for my users.
Notification when the user first login, not so hard, just require a database scan, I can deal with that. However, when a friend send a request or comment on profile X, a notification is sent, and almost immediately receive on the other end even when the user X not making any request. Is it polling? Does not feel like it, since the page never refresh itself. It must be something else? Anyone have any idea? maybe Web Push?
Facebook uses long-polling.
While you're on their page, they have a script continually issue requests to a particular URL. Instead of immediately responding, the server handling that URL first waits for a message to come in to its queue, and then sends that message out to the user. If a certain timeout is reached, the server responds without sending a message, and the client-side script makes another request to that URL.
To see this in action, open up Firebug's Net tab while on a Facebook page and wait for a couple minutes. You should see requests that last for a minute and then are followed up with a new request.
I believe they use AJAX/Javascript for that. It would allow the page to get information from the server and display it without reloading the page. You should be able to do this with an AJAX library like JQuery or something similar. As for whether or not Facebook itself does push or poll, I have no idea, but you can get a similar behavior by polling with AJAX.
Does Facebook provide access to any real time APIs so that you can respond to events as soon as they happen? If not, what alternatives are there and what are their limitations? For example, if I use polling instead, will they limit my api calls? And if I try using RSS feeds, about how much delay can I expect? Or maybe it would be possible to receive and process email notifications (if I could convince a user to forward mail to another email address), as they seem to be dispatched pretty promptly.
I've never tried polling user data, but I think it will work without issues. As far as I know there are no restrictions on the number of API calls you can make on facebook.
As far as the Queries are concerned, what I have seen and I think this is how they implement it. If your query asks for too much data(takes too much time to process is how they measure this I think) - the query will just fail.
eg: I had this app that would pull all the status messages of all the friends of the user and display it in one place. I first queried for all the friends of the user - this worked okay. But at the same time if I ran a loop to get all the status messages for each friend - it would just fail.
I think you can call individual queries without issues, just be careful you query only data you need, cause, if the queries are too big or too many they will just fail. Best way to findout is running tests yourself.
The Facebook Graph API will allow you to subscribe to real time changes. You can currently only subscribe to users, permissions and errors, but they promise to allow subscribing to more objects in the future.