Facebook has recently implemented a change in the rules that follows to create Posts. As a consequence, many users are being affected worldwide, and the impact is still generating questions. Since the change affects the whole ecosystem of tools and solutions associated with Facebook, a new wave of extension updates and news is arriving to incorporate the new definitions.
Particularly, we have just released Joocial, AutoTweetNG PRO and AutoTweet Free 8.14 incorporating enhancements to the current family of components, modules and plugins. Please, remember to update as soon as possible.
What Changed
On July 18th, 2017, Facebook changed the rules of how the complementary information of a link is retrieved to compose a Post.
In the past, a post published by a site or service could be fully defined via Facebook API. The Facebook API could include all values for picture, name, caption, thumbnail and description fields.
After the change of rules, the complementary information of a link is loaded from the page, and the values submitted with the Facebook API are ignored.
This change has already been reported as a bug. For more information: On sharing a URL the picture, name, caption, thumbnail and description set manually is ignored developers.facebook.com/bugs/165375244006359/. We are monitoring if Facebook "fixes" this definition since many developers (14) are reporting this change as a bug. At this point, Facebook has closed all bugs, and the new definition is final.
Facebook post has no image
As an immediate consequence, many posts are being published with no image or a blank rectangle. To solve the issue, Open Graph tags must be implemented on the site, for every content item.
In the past, Open Graph tags were a good practice to adopt and describe the published information. These hidden tags help to enrich the posts manually shared by users. Right now, it's the only way to provide the right fields to Facebook. To confirm how Facebook reads your pages: Testing Your Markup
Next Steps
If your site is publishing posts with missing fields or a wrong image, please, check the following FAQs. We have updated them to reflect the change, and detailed what steps must be taken to solve the issue:
- Facebook shows the wrong image, why? - www.extly.com/docs/autotweetng_joocial/i...-the-wrong-image-why
- What are Facebook's "OpenGraph Tags"? - www.extly.com/docs/autotweetng_joocial/i...ooks-open-graph-tags
- AutoTweet OpenGraph Tags plugins - www.extly.com/docs/autotweetng_joocial/i...tion/open-graph-tags
Finally, we have just released Joocial, AutoTweetNG PRO and AutoTweet Free 8.14 incorporating enhancements to the current family of components, modules and plugins. Please, remember to update as soon as possible.
Reference: Facebook - A Guide to Sharing for Webmasters
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