Facebook sharing is busted
January 16th, 2013I’m not sure when it happened, but in the last few days Facebook sharing, the little buttons under each blog post has been broken, throwing a little red “error”. I’ve also noticed this behaviour in my new aggregators and I’ve ignored it and hoped it would go away after all many Facebook sharing buttons are still working, such as the ones in my favourite quotation collection. Alas even though I don’t want to solve yet another problem dealing with Facebook & PHP it seems I must.
Luckily when I Googled there are answers if not explanations. My first theory was Facebook made some sort of change that no longer likes subdomains as both my blog and my news aggregators are subdomains. However the very first Google result seems to imply the problem is with URL encoding. Alas I was using the Digg Digg plugin on this blog to create the little sharing buttons, I updated to the latest code but it seems this problem does not occur everywhere for everyone.
What did Facebook change?
I wonder what Facebook changed to make my working share buttons become unworking share buttons because I didn’t do a damn thing and I spent a lot of time reading Facebook documentation and testing my code.
I’m going to leave Digg Digg as is, I will send them an email to make them more aware of this issue. It seems they have open sourced the code, so perhaps I or someone more WordPress plugin savvy can make a quick fix. I’d still like to know just what Facebook did to break so many buttons considering they force us to use their Javascript and jump through all sorts of hoops to become a registered Facebook Application which I did for both my blog and my mashup code. Registering your WordPress blog with Facebook is not as easy as they would have you believe.
Facebook is a harsh mistress
Damn it! When I tried to publish this I got another error from Facebook. I’m really thinking it just isn’t worth it using their official plugin. I took another screenshot, but I’ll just quote the text:
Failed posting to your Facebook Timeline. Error: {“message”:”(#100) You haven’t enabled User Messages for this action type (331247406956072) yet. Please update your Open Graph settings in the App Dashboard”,”type”:”OAuthException”}
I and others had a lot of trouble enabling action types or whatever Facebook wants to call it. I definitely did not want to wake up and solve two Facebook related problems today, what happened to making it easy to share information on social networks, this is way, way, way past easy.
I patched Digg Digg’s code
I made a quick and dirty fix to the Digg Digg plugin. After updating to the latest codebase and looking at a support thread on WordPress.org I commented out a couple lines in the constructURL method in the file dd-class.php. I’m not sure this is the perfect fix but commenting out the code dealing with URL encoding has made the error messages go away and the Facebook Like buttons reappear. The code seems to imply there should be a means to turn on and off URL encoding from inside WordPress Digg Digg plugin settings, an official fix will likely be forthcoming.
Bye Bye Social Media Buttons
Over the years I used a number of WordPress plugins to handle social media sharing. I am definitely not a fan of the official Facebook WordPress plugin. Now in 2019 I have no social sharing buttons because they slow down my website especially inside China. If you love social media, you’re welcome to recommend your favourite social media WordPress plugin below.
This entry was originaly posted on , it was last edited on and is filed under: Technology and tagged: Facebook, PHP, Plugin, Social Media, WordPress.
I was quickly able to implement the fix in my news aggregation code, but as for Digg Digg and the larger problems I’m having with Facebook Application registering and the official Facebook for WordPress plugin, I just don’t know, this is just way too many hoops to have to jump through to share what I post automatically. I had it working before with 3rd party plugins/services and it doesn’t take that long to go over and crosspost or to even ‘like’ your own post. Hopefully someone at Digg Digg releases a fix as so far various people have suggested various hacks but no one has committed any official changes.