Is it possible to update xid/url references for my page's comments? - facebook

Our FB Comment widget was implemented incorrectly. The "url" parameter has a stray single quote before "http", like so:
<fb:comments numposts="10" publish_feed="true" migrated="1" class="fb_iframe_widget" url="'http://www.mysite.com/2596795">
Long story short, we didn't catch this till six months down the line. Now Facebook comments are being keyed on our site on the xid/url (I putzed around with the Graph API):
http://www.facebook.com/plugins/comments_v1.php?app_id=XXXXXXXXXX&xid=http\u0025253A\u0025252F\u0025252Fwww.mysite.com\u00252Fdetail\u00252F2596795
Note how FB defaulted the URL to be the URL of the comment itself, with the (malformed) URL as the xid/url params.
Now that I would like to fix the facebook comments widget, how would I go about updating each facebook ID to match to the correct page?

I'm not sure that you can do anything with the migrated version to set it to the right URL.
But just I wrote a complete tutorial of how to leave the migrated boxes as they are,
but start using the new 'href' version in the new comments-boxes,
so if you think it can help you then visit the tutorial

Related

Do Facebook Like Buttons require an App ID?

When going to the set up pages for all the Social Plugins, they now provide example code using an APP ID.
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/
Is an APP ID now required for the Like Button and other plugins? What happens if an APP ID is not included when using the plugins?
I've checked the Facebook developer blog and read about the Like Button Migration. I haven't been able to find a straight answer for this either there or in the FB Like Reference.
Notice:
This is an old dated information, the official facebook's behaviors are changed.
Simply, the answer is No, just look at the following official Facebook resource.
Notice: To do it without need to the app id, you have to visit the above page when you are signed out from Facebook. Look at the following screen shot.
As semsem said, the simple answer is "no it is not required"... there are ways to get around having an appId associated with the "like" button. Here's my experience working with this. I'm not a Facebook or Open Graph expert, so YMMV.
Why we avoided using the appId on the button:
We're providing an service where we have one website (the engine, as it were) that provides a service distributing online courses to students (customers). Instructors (also customers) who what to use our service to disseminate courses to students can brand the site how they wish, and map their domain to their section of our website that serves those course(s).
As a simplified example: we serve from http://courses.example.com/instructor_name, but we want students to access the content through http://www.instructors-domain.com/. Any courses would be sub-directories off the base URL.
Associating the "like" button with our Facebook App disallows any cross domain shenanigans. While there are valid reasons for doing so, it doesn't work for where we're at in our company and product evolution. So we needed to find a workaround.
We wanted to allow folks to "like" a course, have the "story" point to the appropriate places on the net, as well as get some customization (e.g. "NAME likes an online course on FBAppName"). We basically achieved this. We lost some functionality which we deemed acceptable at this point in our evolution.
The short of it
I used the iframe version of the Facebook "like" button as dictated by the appropriate Facebook developer's page (for the link see semesm's answer for the link, I got no rep). I took their code snippet and manually removed the appId query string in the iframe's src.
In the "liked" page itself (which was the same page that had the "like" button) I used the Open Graph meta tags including specifying the appId. (These tags were specified: fb:app_id, og:type, og:url, og:site_name, og:title, og:description, og:image.)
The og:type was our custom type of the form 'namespace:app_custom_object_name'.
A failed approach
My first attempt was to use what I understand as the preferred method, the "HTML5" tab in the "Get Code" section of the developer's "like-button" page. I tried their method stripping the appId from the appropriate places. This method proved ineffectual.
If the domain doesn't match that in the Facebook App, there will be no "like" button.
If the domain does match, the "like" button will appear. However, it takes 3 clicks to actually "like" something. The first click changes the "thumbs-up Like" icon to a normal anchor with one word that didn't make obvious sense (I forgot what the word was). The second click will brings up the login/authorization window for using our app. The third actually bring up the modern fancy "like" box where you can type in a comment. I didn't find a way around this behavior.
Note that when I specified the appId in this approach on the appropriate domain, it worked as one would expect (though inconsistent with our desired behavior).
I did not try the other two options in the "Get Code" section of the "like-button" page.
Informed speculation and rumor
In my research around this, my overall impression is that requiring an appId is the way of the future for Facebook. Who knows if the old way will be depreciated, probably never, though I didn't find anything in the docs talking about this "legacy" behavior. This makes sense to me with their newer offerings and the advanced tracking that becomes available with this method.
I've seen suggestions that the "likes" used in this manner are akin to second-class citizens... treated as inferior in some respects. In my own experimentation I found the behavior of the fully specified appId (in the "like" button itself) to be different and more accessible and predictable (in terms of Open Graph queries and visibility on my limited Facebook tests) than the partially specified appId. (Again, I've found no solid documentation on this, and did not endeavor to full grok the differences.)
May this info help someone else along. Good luck!
So, I just tried the sємsєм method, as comments say: Facebook want you to login to get the code, and if you have an app, you have to choose one.
But if you don't, it gives you a code without any app reference.
So when you get a code – no matter any app you choose –, you just need to remove the appId parameter in the .js URL (&appId=##############), and you got (for the latest HTML5 code, 6th line):
js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1";
The code for the div element does not change.
I simply use the URL code inside an iframe tag without an appID and it seams to work,
here is an example:
<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=<%=request.original_url%>&width&layout=button_count&action=like&show_faces=false&share=false&height=35&appId=" frameBorder="0" width="150" height="25">
</iframe>
According to Facebook's Social Plugins FAQ
Web: If you are using Social Plugins on the web, you do not need to create a Facebook app for integrating a Social Plugin.
iOS/Android: If you are using Social Plugins within a iOS or Android app, you need to create a Facebook app and tie it to your app identifier.
It seems that the official answer is that they are only required for iOS/Android.

Facebook like is broken, adds a trailing # to the final url

I'm running my site on Cargo Collective and trying to have likes per page. I cannot modify the code in the head tag only within the body tag.
When i debug a page i get the following;
Response Code 206
Fetched URL http://www.iamneuron.com/Break-this
Canonical URL http://www.iamneuron.com/Break-this
URL for Likes http://www.iamneuron.com/#Break-this
Final URL http://www.iamneuron.com/#Break-this
I can't figure this out and i have been searching for a while now. Even if i explicitly specify the url rather than leaving the code to figure it out, facebook still adjusts the url to one that doesn't work with the trailing #.
Originally i was trying to create the like code via facebook but i have now switched to this which works better with cargo but still produces the same error:
http://randomcodescraps.tumblr.com/post/1363402555/js-dynamic-like-button-on-cargo-collective-projects
Anybody any ideas? Thanks in advance btw!
Your page doesn't have any OG tags that Facebook can use. And those that are in your page are commented out. Add proper OG tags and then use the link tool to check you tags and see if still have the same problem.

Is it possible to change the Facebook Comments assotiation URL somehow?

We have recently changed our URL scheme of some pages on our site to gain a little SEO boost. For example, domain.tld/$id/slug/ -> domain.tld/$category/slug-$id/.
However the comments associated to the old URLs are now obviously not shown on the new URLs as the links are generated automatically using the new scheme.
As our site is very new, we don't have many comments yet. Obviously we would hate to lose those few comments we already have and would rather migrate their association to the new URL scheme. I haven't found such option on the Comment Moderation Tool and the comments documentation doesn't elaborate on this either. Is that possible at all?
I never tried this, but I imagine that having the old pages return a 301/302 redirect to the new ones would do the trick.
This way, you would keep pointing your comments to the OLD pages' URLs, not the new ones.
Try this
<fb:comments href="http://www.domain.com/oldurl"></fb:comments>

Facebook feed link back to article not working for Facebook Comments implemented on custom CMS

I implemented facebook comments across a legacy, custom CMS. I used the XFBML implementation. Everything works as expected except when clicking the links back to the article page from a commenter's facebook feed the comment box does not show any comments. The link is of this form:
{Article URL}?fb_comment_id={comment_id_string}
And if I remove the comment parameter and only go to the article url the comment box renders correctly with the comment and all other comments on the article. So, it's some issue with the fb_comment_id parameter. One weird thing about how I had to implement the comments is, because of how the routing on the site works, I could not use server side code to set the the URL parameter in the <fb:comments> object. So I had to use this jquery code in the <head>:
<script>
// assign current page to comments url
$(document).ready(function() {
$('fb\\:comments').each(function(){
$(this).attr('href', window.location);
});
});
</script>
And used this for the actual <fb:comments> code:
<fb:comments href="{site's root URL}" num_posts="8" width="570"></fb:comments>
So, I figure doing this client side may be causing the issue. Not doing this server side is a hard constraint though, and everything else works so I'm hopeful there may be some way to make this work. If making the comment link work correctly is impossible, a reasonable hack would be to rewrite the link in the facebook feed so that it just points to the article url without adding the comment parameter. Any suggestions? Thanks!
NOTE: I've also tried using the html5 comments implementation and there is the same issue.;
Once facebook has rendered the iframe based upon your fb:comments tag, does it have the correct url? I am thinking it does not. You may have to call FB.XFBML.parse() after you inject the complete

FaceBook Comments plugin help

I am trying to use the facebook comments plugins in my website.
so I added the plugin in every article.
but the comments are the same, for example if i wrote a comment in article a,
it appears also in article b.
did anyone know how to work with that?
If you are using ASP.Net then you could always set the href attribute of the fb:comments tag to be the same url as that of your page. This ensures unique comment maintainability across different pages (articles). I have included the implementation that I used on www.myPUBGUIDE.com below:
<fb:comments href="<%=HttpContext.Current.Request.Url.AbsoluteUri %>" num_posts="10" width="500"></fb:comments>
you set the xid unique for each article; all comments with the same xid will appear together