The documentation for Facebook's Feed Dialog and Share Dialog suggest that if a user is not logged in to your app, you have no way of determining whether or not the user actually shared the story or just opened the dialog and clicked "Cancel".
My experimentation seems to match this behavior. Can someone please confirm that this is the case? (I would love it if I were wrong)
To clarify: I understand there's no way to receive post_id as a response if the user is not logged in (Facebook has deprecated this behavior). However, I'm surprised there's not even a way to determine if a post was actually shared or if the "Cancel" button was clicked...
It seems like exposing this isn't a "privacy risk" for Facebook; having this success/canceled boolean available would be very useful in building a good UX.
Related
I would like to have a button in my Facebook app that will bring up a dialog that will allow the user to pick a friend's wall to post on. I was pretty sure this kind of dialog exists but so fare I have only been able to find a dialog that will allow you to send messages to a friend or post to a specific Facebook user's wall (without a dialog) but I cannot find anywhere in the documentation where it describes how to bring up a dialog that allows selection of user's to publish to. Is this possible? If so could someone post a link to some documentation?
You can use Facebook's Multi-Friend-Selector(MFS).
Documentation: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/games/custom-muti-friend-selector/
I ended up using the thesedays Facebook-friend-selector which works very nicely.
It has a Facebook style look and feel and filled my needs:
https://github.com/thesedays/Facebook-friend-selector
I wrote the app that posts to user's wall and the wall of her friend, and to accomplish this, asks for publish_stream permission, but now I got the opinion from another guy that this is too much and that there is a simpler way (less scary permissions dialog). However I can't reach him at the moment to ask what he has meant exactly. What is the truth here?
You don't need any permissions at all with the javascript SDK to call fb.UI with a 'method' of 'feed' because the user will see a dialog box to confirm and enter a message of what they are sharing. To publish from server-side code like PHP SDK, you will need publish_stream.
I'm developing an app which publishes actions to the timeline.
On the app settings, I've created the action "post" and use the built in object type "article".
Although my graph actions have not been approved by facebook, that should not be a problem, because I am logged in as the developer of the app.
My article URLs pass facebook's linter with warnings, but no errors.
When my app notifies facebook of the the post action, it appears to succeed. Facebook returns an ID representing the action.
When I use facebook's graph explorer to view that ID, the data appears to be correct, showing the correct action type and object data. (If there's a URL to browse the action on facebook, instead of the graph explorer, I do not know what it is).
Still, with all the above apparently working without errors, I never see the action on my timeline. Whether I browse my own timeline, or when logged in as a friend and another developer of the app, I never see any indication on facebook.com that the action was performed.
What am I missing to make my custom action appear on my timeline page?
I had a similar problem. I was using OG and I could post everything successfully, but the posts didn't appear in timeline, but only in the activity log in Facebook.
I just went to the settings of the action and set "Explicitly Shared: This action can specify the user explicitly shared an action." to ON.
Then in my piece of code I put "true" to the key "fb:explicitly_shared" while creating the OG object.
If no error is being returned it sounds as if there is an issue in your public page that is preventing Facebook from knowing what to post.
Have you double checked your OG: meta tags through Facebook's validation tool [ https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug ]. While you need all of the values to be filled in, the type bit is the most overlooked and must be setup properly to link to your particular application and corresponding action.
If your OG: data is correct and validating you should also check the detail settings for your action and aggregations. If the phrase / tense bits are not filled in Facebook may be uncertain how to make your post appear back to on the timeline.
Discoverd the problem....
My article page include an article:author tag. The URL in that tag was not visible to anonymous users. So, I'm guessing, facebook visited that author URL and received a HTTP 403.
When I removed the article:author tag, the items started appearing on my timeline.
So be careful with all tags and put all urls through facebook's debug tool.
Hmmm Interesting
Was having the same issue...
Using the XFBML, fb:like with all required og meta tags validating on the linter.
Last month when I liked a 'product' on my website, the post was published on my fb timeline wall no worries. Nice, perfect!
Today after clicking Like, I noticed it wasn't publishing to my timeline wall at all... but was logged in the Activity Feed.
It did however post to my wall if I commented on the Like Button flyout comment section.
Then I found this
"Pages of type article do not have publishing rights, and will not show up on user's profiles because they are not real world objects."
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraphprotocol/#types
I've been getting the same issue with a feed dialog post. The posts can be navigated to directly, but doesn't show on timeline. More details here:
Actions not appearing on timeline
I had a similar problem, but everything was actually working correctly. If you get a returned ID and your article appears in your RECENT ACTIVITY, then all should be good.
The perceived issue, your post not appearing in your timeline, is actually the correct behavior. Your post doesn't appear in your timeline because it should appear in your friends' timeline as an activity that you completed. Once they comment or like it, then it should reappear on your timeline.
For me the issue was the posts doesn't show on timeline for all users except me also it was public !, i fixed it by make turn on application as online to be available to all users
OK, apologies for the verbose title. Let me give the background in a bit more detail.
My website allows my registered users to create new pages, each of which has its own unique URL. Each page has a Facebook "Like" button on it. I've already implemented Facebook Open Graph API meta tags so that the pages are proper open graph objects, and when some other visiting Facebook user "likes" the registered user's page, a post appears on that Facebook user's wall saying they have liked the page. The Facebook Like widget also displays the number of "likes" that page has received as normal. So far, so good.
What I want to do is allow my registered users to be able to communicate back to the Facebook users who have liked their page. The community of "likers" for a page is a potentially valuable social media resource to the registered user, if only they could communicate back.
I am aware of the "admin page" link you get beside the Like button, which can be used to post to these people, but that is not an option for my registered users as they have no privileges in relation to the Like button.
What I want to do, if possible, is setup a form to capture the registered user's message back to the Facebook users, and then my website sends the message on their behalf, without having to ask for any extra privileges from the Facebook users.
The following Facebook documentation pages seem to say this is possible, but having followed the Open Graph API documentation, I can't get it to work as described - http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/465/ and http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/ ("Publishing" subsection). I can get the access token correctly in the first request, and plug that into the second request to do the post, but that doesn't seem to do anything and doesn't return any error.
Since it doesn't work for me, I'm wondering if this is possible as described, or do I need to get some sort of extra permission to do this? I've seen reference to offline_access permission but as I'm new to this stuff I am not sure how it would fit in. If I have to get the Facebook users to grant permissions, this is not going to work as envisaged.
Any thoughts would be most helpful.
The short answer: No, You will never been able to post on someones wall as another user.
The long answer:
You could try to ask for offline access but then you are asking the user to hand over all their facebook data and give you access todo whatever you like their accound, so that is not likely to happend.
The next problem is that they have to be friends to be able to post on each others walls.
Thats why Pages was implemented, so that organisations could announce/talk with the people interested.
However if you have created the like button correctly and give the pages correct meta data, you are able to post to user who have liked it.
Scroll down to Publishing:
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/
Just add a form for your user and let your system publish to the correct page, you probably will need a offline token from your own account or similar to use on the server.
Another more complex way could be to generate a facebook page for each page you have on your server.
When the user creates a page on your system a page is created on facebook but as your app as admin.
And when another user likes the page they like the facebook page, hence you have the possibility to post in that page and speak to the user who liked it. (whooa thats a mouthfull).
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/