We have a Facebook app that publishes URLs to a user's newsfeed via the Facebook iOS SDK. These URLs are for pages that have OpenGraph attributes defined and we've verified in the Facebook Linter that it's correctly defined.
However, periodically we are seeing that Facebook won't correctly parse the OpenGraph attributes and have less than a stellar post to Facebook:
We will most often get posts parsed correctly resulting in posts like these:
We'll periodically get posts like these:
However, you can see this later post works correctly in the FB Url Linter: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=http%3A%2F%2Fchewsy.com%2Fr%2Fa%2F1bhLT.
However, sometimes the URL Linter will report a 503 but I see nothign in our logs. And even more odd, when the URL Linter reports the 503, it will shows that it can read the OpenGraph attributes defined. See this screenshot:
Since this is inconsistent, my first guess was this was a Facebook issue so I opened a bug. However, since I'm not seeing this issue rampant in the newsfeed with other apps, I'm starting to wonder if we aren't following the right steps to publishing FB content.
For example, are we supposed to post to the URL Linter first, then publish via the Graph API? This seems like a ridiculous extra step, but I'm grasping at straws here...
It's probably due to fact that in a time Facebook Linter visited your site it wasn't accessible, just couple of refreshes on a Linter Tool with URL you've provided resulted in Bad Response Code error, returning 503 status code:
http://chewsy.com/r/a/1bhLT"">
You should dig in logs of your application/site to discover the real reason why this happen and fix it.
Just a quick note that this should no longer be happening for CloudFlare users. We pushed a fix for the 503 debugger issue moments ago that appears to have fixed the problem. Please contact us if you see any other issues with the Facebook Debugger.
Related
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!
Our desktop application integrates with Facebook using the desktop app workflow and for approx. 18 months has been working without any problems. However, we are starting to get reports from some users that they cannot get past the login process.
When the login is successful Facebook should be attaching the access_token to the redirect_uri. Our application detects this and moves the user to the main part of our Facebook integration. What appears to be happening in some situations is that the access_token parameter is missing which causes our application to leave our embedded browser window open with the following message from Facebook:
"Success
SECURITY WARNING: Please treat the URL above as you would your password and do not share it with anyone."
What is strange is that this does not occur with all Facebook accounts and which Facebook accounts it occurs with seems to be changing. For example, we had a report of this approx. 1 week ago but could not duplicate it with my own Facebook account or with a colleague's Facebook account. Today, I still cannot duplicate it with my own Facebook account but my colleague now gets the problem.
The URL our code sends to Facebook is:
https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/authorize?client_id=xxxx&redirect_uri=http://www.facebook.com/connect/login_success.html&type=user_agent&display=popup&scope=read_friendlists,user_photos,friends_photos,user_photo_video_tags,friends_photo_video_tags,user_events,friends_events,user_groups,friends_groups
Reading the latest API documentation it looks like they recommend a different way to connect which we have also tried:
https://www.facebook.com/dialog/oauth?client_id=xxxx&redirect_uri=http://www.facebook.com/connect/login_success.html&scope=read_friendlists,user_photos,friends_photos,user_photo_video_tags,friends_photo_video_tags,user_events,friends_events,user_groups,friends_groups&response_type=token
To rule out our application as the cause we have tried these URLs directly within a web browser. What we find is that when using my Facebook account the browser re-directs to the success URL that includes the access_token parameter but when using my colleague's account the browser re-directs to the success URL that includes the access_token and then immediately re-directs again to the success URL without the access_token.
so... As far as we can tell this is either:
a) A change to the API which we cannot find documented anywhere
b) A bug in Facebook
c) Something that is now controlled by the user's Facebook security settings
Is there anybody who could explain why Facebook is acting differently with different accounts and how we can go about fixing this?
Thanks.
Kevin.
I have the same problem in my desktop applications.
And I just solve it with careful reading in ht*ps://developers.facebook.com/docs/howtos/login/login-for-desktop/. The solution is to change redirect_uri from ht*p://www.facebook.com/... into ht*ps://www.facebook.com/...
Hope this will help you just like it help me
NB:
change ht*p into http
sorry i have to change the http into ht*p so that i can post the answer.
I've added a facebook Like button to a few of my web site pages. All of them work except for the home page and I can't figure out why?
It is almost impossible to answer this question without seeing some sample code of your "home page".
Check your page with https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug
If the response code isn't 200 or your meta tags don't appear properly or whatever else, at least you'll know where to look. Keep in mind that when you click like, Facebook makes a request to your page. Make sure you let Facebook do that (don't block/Redirect the Facebook crawler).
Edit: Sometimes, simply adding your URL and testing on the link above solves the problem. This is if you had a problem with the site when you first added it and meanwhile Facebook cached it as problematic. Debugging it will clear the Facebook cache for that URL.
I operate a website, http://www.plingo.com.br/
I have created a like button for that webpage, as well as specified opengraph tags that point back to the same URL and included a video.
I have set the og:type tag to 'blog'.
When someone clicks Like, the video and URL get posted to the users feed as expected.
However, my issue revolves around being able to publish to users of my feed.
As you can see in my opengraph tags, I have associated my URL to a facebook application that I own.
I have followed the instructions at developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/ on how to publish to my feed directly, however when I run the PHP script, I receive this error:
"error": {
"message": "(#100) (the url) does not resolve to a valid user ID",
"type": "OAuthException"
}
However, the opengraph at the URL points both to my facebook account as well as my application.
I have no idea why I am unable to do this.
However, to try to diagnose the issue, I made a similar webpage at http://www.plingo.com.br/ogtest.php and set all the attributes of the opengraph tags the same, except for the og:url and the youtube video. Running the publish script using that URL however, works fine, and facebook even generated an administrative page for publishing to facebook.
I am wondering why this is not working with my root URL. Is there any way to get Facebook to give me an Administrative Page? Why can't I publish, even though I have associated the opengraph IDs properly?
I would GREATLY appreciate any input as I have tried countless different things, changes, etc to see where the issue lies.
Thank you
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