I have an URL like:
mywebsite.com/news/
and a facebook like button on each page. The problem is that when you like a page, the counter for all pages is affected, e.g.:
mywebsite.com/news/news-1/
mywebsite.com/news/?new_id=1
mywebsite.com/news/1/
mywebsite.com/news/news-2/
mywebsite.com/news/?new_id=2
mywebsite.com/news/2/
all this as well as mywebsite.com/news/ will have the increased counter as if you've "liked" them all.
I was using the < iframe > and switched to the < fb:like > but the bug still occurs.
I've found this thread: http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewtopic.php?pid=252714 where the people seemed to have the same problem that somehow got fix for one of them, but still persist for me.
Any ideas how to fix it?
This tool gives you specific information what is parsed by Facebook and where the error could be. I found it really helpful:
http://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint/
Related
I'm working on a site for a client. The site is built in Joomla and is using a Facebook like button on each page. When a user clicks a like button it unclicks itself after a second or two.
I've seen several similar problems here but none have provided enough insight to help me figure out what to do to fix this problem.
I ran the page through the Facebook debugger:
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theartoflove.net%2Findex.php%2F9-blog%2Fmen%2F27-go-ahead-and-ask-her-out
but I don't have a clue how to figure out what that result is telling me. The URL I used as a test in the debugger is:
http://www.theartoflove.net/index.php/9-blog/men/27-go-ahead-and-ask-her-out
Anyone know what I need to do to fix this problem? It seems to happen regardless of what like box I put on the site (I've tried three different ones so far).
My sincere thanks for any help!
When I clicked the like button, a small 'CONFIRM' link appeared under the "Like" widget, i had to click the 'CONFIRM' link (which brought up a dialog box asking me to confirm that I liked the page) in order to get the "Like" to stick.
See image
Facebook sometimes makes the arbitrary determination that your page is 'spammy' and adds extra precautions like 'CONFIRM'. That may be part of what is going on.
The code is reentrant and the developer is flipping the bit instead of verifying the current state with a conditional before setting the value. (This is a common coding mistake. Too common.)
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 implemented the like-button on the page http://www.racket-center.de on every subpage of this site. I noticed that it didn't show up on every page so I tried different implementation-versions (html5, iframe etc) but it didn't work. If I remember correctly the more I tried the less pages the button appeared on.
Now the button doesn't show up anymore – not even within the wizard at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/ You can try it yourself: if you enter the URL of the site + then change another option to get the wizard checking the url the like-button will disappear.
I tried to debug via the linter and fixed some minor warnings it complained (e.g. adjusting the og:image-size to fit 200x200px) but that didn't bring back the button.
I guess the page is kind of blacklisted but I don't know + if it was blacklisted I don't know why.
Does anybody have a clue what might be going on here or kind point me to any resource about fb's blacklists?
Would be nice to get some help.
Thx,
Michael
This happens on any web browser. When I go to the page, I see the like button not showing any counts. Then I...
Press on the Like button.
I then see the box say +1.
I refresh the page.
I no longer see the +1 and I see the Like button as if it was never pressed.
I can repeat steps 1-4 endlessly with the same results - I never see the total live count.
It would seem like it's not keeping counts, but when I query it via:
https://api.facebook.com/method/fql.query?query=select total_count,like_count,comment_count,share_count,click_count from link_stat where url='https://www.myswebsite.com/'&format=json
I see the live stats - so I know it's working. I've also tried different variations of http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/ - and old versions as well. I've isolated the code to just be the facebook code with nothing else on the page. For some reason, when I use https://www.myswebsite.com/ it doesn't show. I try other URLs like http://www.google.com with the code, and it works fine, I can see the count.
It's an SSL web site. Does this have anything to do with it? Also, when we initially launched the site with the Like button, it was http://mywebsite.com originally. Then we switched it to http://www.myswebsite.com, and then setup a SSL wildcard to function with both. I'm not sure if caching has anything to do with it.
Thanks!
This blog post might give you some help. What the post says is that you can "sort of" clean your URL with Facebook URL linter tool
Also there is a bug reported related to this issue
I have a facebook like button on each of my wordpress blog posts, this worked fine up until about 2 weeks ago, and now all recent blog posts don't have functioning like buttons.
This is the response I get when I click the like button (post link)
for (;;);{"__ar":1,"payload":{"requires_login":false,"success":false,"already_connected":false,"is_admin":false,"show_error":false,"error_info":null}}
and for the old blog posts that DO work (post link):
for (;;);{"__ar":1,"payload":{"requires_login":false,"error_info":null,"show_error":false,"node_type":"ExternalLink","node_id":"xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx","edge_type":"ExternalLinkLike","connect_text":0,"success":true,"already_connected":true,"user_profile":{"name":"xxxxxxx","profile_url":"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/xxxxxxx","pic_square":"http:\/\/profile.ak.fbcdn.net\/hprofile-ak-snc4\/xxxxxx_xxxxxxxxx_xxxxxxx_x.jpg"},"story_fbid":"xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx","is_admin":false,"admin_url":""},"invalidate_cache":[0]}
I've tried replacing the like box code, removing the href attribute from the like box tag, running each link through Facebook URL Linter and none of this has worked!
I don't understand why it works for old blog posts and not new ones, there are no differences between them (that I know of).
This issue has nothing to do with your code. It is a FB issue I encounter on my websites as well. Did some research and came up with this:
this behavior is intermittent, may work on some pages, may fail on others
if you go on this page: http://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint/ and enter your url there, first time it will show up an error, afterwards the page will load. Hit some refreshes and afterwards the like button on your site (on the entered url) will suddenly start working... Very weird! I think it has something to do with FB crawler and (maybe) when accessing the lint tool you somehow force the crawler to recheck your page or something.
If anyone finds out something else, please share, the issue is really annoying...
Looking at the forums here:
http://forum.developers.facebook.net/viewforum.php?id=53
It looks like several other developers are running into the same issue. Some posts there also brought up having to use the lint tool to get their like buttons to work. I've also gotten it to work on my site by just mashing the Like button until it eventually accepts it so like what hpuiu said, i'm pretty confident that this problem's on their end.
Edit: And maybe on a related note, another post said that FB stopped scraping their site until they used the lint tool on their page and another said that they seem to consistently get this issue for any new posts that're around for less than 24 hours.
You could try to add the Iframe version of the like box instead of their javascript version. Sometimes it actually works better when loading multiple post for example.
Facebook doesn't like the '/' at the end of the url. So you can use something like this to omit the '/' at the end of the url :
$title = get_permalink();
<fb:like href="<?php echo substr($title, 0, -1); ?>" layout="button_count" width="300" show_faces="false"></fb:like>