App not getting data from Graph API anymore & problems filling out for review - facebook-graph-api

Take a breath... it's a very specific question, not directly a bug.
(But I can't get an answer from Facebook, after thousands of FAQ pages I somehow landed in a chat with Facebook Advertisers Support, they told me to come here.)
Description of my app
I have a Facebook Page, on which I'm sharing events from some other Facebook Pages I'm cooperating with. Kind of an event aggregator. The main goal is to help people who are new in town to find all that interesting events and the groups and pages they are organized by.
As you can imagine, it's based on a server-side application, that collects the upcoming events through Graph API and posts on my own Facebook Page the day before the event.
Of course I had to give the server-side application the manage_pages and publish_pages right. This Facebook App will never be used by an end-user, I'm the only user and I'm only posting to my own Facebook Page.
The server-side application worked fine for more than a year.
I just started a Facebook Ad Campaign and poster and flyers are currently being printed. And now...
What broke
You all heard of Cambridge Analytica. Due to these bad guys Facebook is currently changing a lot. One change was this:
As we begin enhancing our new app review process and make changes to our platform, the Events, Groups, Pages and Instagram APIs will no longer be available to new developers. Testing of our more robust process starts today and the new process should resume in a few weeks, but apps currently accessing Events and Groups APIs will lose access today. Going forward, access to these APIs will require a formal app review and for apps using the Pages API, submission is required within 90 days once app review resumes or access will be removed.
(See https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2018/04/04/facebook-api-platform-product-changes)
Since nearly two weeks my server-application can't fetch events. Graph API is always returning an empty array data: [].
I have full understanding for this. Now I tried to follow these new requirements and had a look on how to submit my App for review. But that's where my struggles began:
The specific problem
The whole form for applying for review is aimed to Apps for end-users, not server-side bots.
I should provide details on why I'm using manage_pages or publish_pages. Well okay...
When selecting "automated posting" there immediatly a message pops up, telling me, that this is not allowed. Of course it is not - for applications that post in the name of persons without their knowing and aggreement. But my App is posting in the name of my own Facebook Page and I'm the only user and I'm knowing what's going to be posted. So I have to select "Other" and enter a custom description. No problem.
But at the end of the form there's asked for a Screencast! What should I make a movie of? Should I make a slideshow of my code? I can't save this form without that Screencast.
I want to be conform to the new Facebook processes, but I simply don't know how to become approved nor at least fill out for review...
I know this is not a programming question but Facebook directed me here.
So I hope I find a Facebook official or Facebook developer here. Thank you so far!

Related

Starting using Instagram oEmbed feature

What is the correct way to start using Instagram oEmbed feature? Documentation (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram/oembed/) claims that I have to pass App Review to start using the feature. And application form says Please provide a URL where we can test Oembed Read. Which I don't have because I have no access to the feature.
What I have tried with no success:
I requested instagram_oembed resource with:
app token of application in live mode
app token of application in
development mode
passed URL to a post by official Instagram account
(e.g. https://www.instagram.com/p/CQG4gZxMzzO/)
passed URL to a post
of a user who is Admin of the app
In all cases I receive (#10) To use 'Oembed Read', your use of this endpoint must be reviewed and approved by Facebook. To submit this 'Oembed Read' feature for review please read our documentation on reviewable features: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/review.
Example of the request I do https://graph.facebook.com/v11.0/instagram_oembed?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.instagram.com%2Fp%2FCQG4gZxMzzO%2F&access_token=appAccessToken
We're also suffering from this issue, but so far, we thought we already figured out how to do that.
Big picture
Facebook had not sorted this thing out correctly. Or at least, we don't know why they put such a restriction to this API.
The official document is not correct. (or at least not accurate for now, for some part)
Which part was not correct?
The access token part is not right. Or at least, it's the most confusion part.
How can we resolve this?
Use the Graph API Explorer
Adjust your token(App token, Client access token, user token) with the official URLs(see below) to see if you can get the result
most of us should be able to get the result with user access token, which means you have to access this API after login!
Integrate into your app for review
The review page is also confusing:
Please provide a URL where we can test Oembed Read. Include the URL of a page, post or video from our official Facebook or Instagram pages, or the pages themselves., it means you can only use links like https://www.facebook.com/instagram or https://www.facebook.com/facebook
With that in mind, so far, the only way to get approved is integrate your oembed usage into your normal UI with facebook user access token ready
Question to the big picture
So, we have to ask user to login with our facebook app, then we can provide this oembed read API returned embed HTML? I'm afraid that's what we have now.
big companies might be able to apply for App Token, I guess in that scenario, facebook login is not necessary
for small companies, indie developers, hmmm, I don't know any better solutions so far.
I have run into this too. I do not have an answer at this time, I just want to report on the frustrations of their 'app review' process. Which makes it feel like you are unlikely to get it to work any time soon.
We have a custom embed code for our weblog authors to use (a shortcode kind of thing) which does the oEmbed call. We just take the HTML from the resulting JSON, and insert it into the weblog article page, and that is it. It stopped working, presenting this same error - in live mode, and in development mode.
The kicker is, I then tried submitting it for app review. Filled out everything I could to the best of my knowledge. Provided them a test account and post on our weblog to show the shortcode editing and expected placement. We got rejected. Why? Your embedding resulted in an error, we can't see it in action to approve you.
Yes. The error I am getting is that I need my 'app' to be reviewed and approved.
This is an infuriating process. This is the only Facebook / Instagram API feature we use at this point. No user data. No attempt to make an Instagram clone app or anything like that. Just an embed.
And they are making this simple use case as impossible to use as they can. And the documentation also feels like an infinite loop. They say users of the old Instagram embed call have until September 7 2021 to get approved. But the call does not work at all because we are not approved. So we cannot get approved.
Same loop here. I've managed to report it to Facebook team and get answer "Just submit your Instagram post URL"! I can't believe it, its can't be so simple. I've confirmed it few times with Facebook team person and.... get rejected!
Also, second form in App Review process will LOWERCASE all of your links and I've spent few days just to explain it to reviewers and support person. Still rejected after submitting proper url. This is insane.
My another attempt was about to build a test page where I can auth via Facebook account, parse connected Instagram accounts and GET embed endpoint with user access key in hope that reviewer HAS access to oembed feature - REJECTED. I can't even find what permission I need to add to auth URL to obtain oembed thing.
Will update my answer with new information later.
UPDATE: After reporting about the issue with lowercase URL in submission form they just APPROVED my app without APP REVIEW. Well... Facebook style...
I had exactly the same problem recently. Updated the packages with compose, changed the API version from 10 to 11... without any change.
The error was also occurring in development mode, it didn't make sense that Facebook was asking to approve in dev mode.
For me, the problem came from the management of scopes in my application, depending on the version of the Facebook API used.
My advice: check the scopes defined with API version in your code first.
I had the same issue and the solution is very simple. The only thing you need to do is copy paste an instagram url in the input field saying: Please provide a URL where we can test Oembed Read.
I did the this link: https://www.instagram.com/p/G/
Which is actually the first instagram post :) Got approved. Hope this helps everybody!

disabling facebook comments with actions field on wall posts

My app allows users to interact with each other for a unique purpose. As part of this experience I post on user's wall so his/her friends can know about the post from user and they can come to app for interaction. But in this case, users may just end up commenting on the facebook page itself and my app will not have any knowledge of this interaction. To avoid this, I am wondering if I can disable comments on this post. Graph API documentations states that I can use the "actions" field on wall post for such purpose. I tried that with various combinations of Comment and empty link or link that takes the user to my app etc. But I notice that no matter what I set, facebook always shows link to the wall post instead of what I tried to put.
Any thoughts on how to achieve this purpose?
Thanks.

Publishing Actions: link back to website from user wall

I am building a website that will require the user to provide permission for us to post a story back to the users wall when the user takes an action on my website. I would like the story to include a link back to my website so that friends can see the actions taken.
I am not sure of the correct permissions because I cannot get a link back to my website from the story post. I saw publish_stream, but that appears to be old now. Any pointers to FB policy and documentation would be appreciated. I
Instead of making stream posts, you should instead use Open Graph actions, which will give you a much better result and feel less 'spammy' to your users. I can't post code that will do this for you as it would need to fit into your existing setup, however it is a relatively simple process, which is well documented (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/actions/):
Auth users by prompting them to give publish_actions permission and any other permissions your app might need.
Store the users access token in your database (not necessary if you're using the client-side Javascript SDK, but you might want to do it anyway)
Setup your Open Graph Actions and Objects in the Developer Dashboard.
When a user performs a relevant action in your app, make a simple Graph API call to the following endpoint:
https://graph.facebook.com/me/YOUR_APP_NAMESPACE:YOUR_ACTION? YOUR_OBJECT_TYPE=YOUR_OBJECT_URL&access_token=YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN
Done.
You can add extra elements to the action, such as action links, however the basics are outlined above. Once you've performed those steps, the user will see something like this on their Timeline:
The part that says 'on NYCCookbook' is customisable and clicking on most parts of this story will bring Facebook users back to your site. There are many benefits you can get if you implement this all correctly.

Facebook communication to Application

The start-up i currently work for is oriented around restaurant wait times. For our v1.25 specifications our clients -restaurants- that have Facebook pages want to be able to communicate to their app profile from their Facebook page.
The closest i have came to answering this question is the Graph API. However, the Graph API only allows us to read and write data to FB pages. So, is there a way for a restaurants FB page to write to its app profile? Secondly, Loso, whom we have modeled some of our designs from has this ability, does anyone have an idea as to how they have done it?
--Boris M.
Here is an option that you can consider...
When you are designing the app you can also develop a page tab to go with it...
You will find this option in the basic settings of the app.
You can make it to install for all first time users of your app, by getting a list of all his pages he created using that profile then install it on the one he selects.
This page tab when installed on a page will appears just where other tabs on the page appers(e.g. events, notes etc. occurs)
You can provide your required functionality on this tab as you like.
Thus the user can just select that tab on the page and use its functionality to post on the profile page of the app.
Hope this works for you... and also u can check out the jobcaster app it does something like that!

Facebook integration... Where to start?

I recently put a django project of mine into its beta stages and would really like to integrate more with social media, particularly facebook.
Now there are so many facebook integrations out there... I don't know where to start but, I'll tell you what I am after.
My sites publishes content with photos and also user related data (which site doesn't)
on each individual page I already have a facebook like button that basically has the absolute url of that page
so for instance:
http://my-site.com/url-1
http://my-site.com/url-345345
http://my-site.com/url-456456456
When a user likes this particular url I would like them to become a Fan on my facebook site/page as well.
I also added the FB opengraph tool which is a bit more informative once a user likes it. But it still does not publish any statistics to my page.
Can someone give me a bit of an understanding on what the best option is for this type of integration?
As a security option for the user, Facebook has never allowed third party access to "become a fan."
If you want to record locally when someone presses the "Like" button, you'll have to implement it locally (copy the presentation, and query Facebook yourself), so you can intercept the event. I've done that; it's not too hard.
I suggest you review the Connect Terms of Service to see what it is you're allowed to do: http://developers.facebook.com/policy/