Publicize Broken AGAIN after update

  • Resolved jefflabonte

    (@jefflabonte)


    9 years, 6 months ago

    Publicize worked fine yesterday at 4:45pm. I updated Jetpack last night. Guess what? Broken. Publicize is not pulling photos from WordPress properly for Facebook.

    This happens EVERY TIME there is a Jetpack update. And EVERY TIME Jetpack has a convenient excuse about how it is my site’s open graphs or a Facebook problem. Look, Facebook is the 800 pound gorilla. Jetpack is the ant. If you can’t get Jetpack updates to play nice with Facebook – and that is what Publicize is supposed to do – then discontinue the product.

    My Facebook is showing images of ads from my site. It is not pulling the feature photo as it’s supposed to, it is not even pulling ads that are on the page in questions. It is pulling some random ad from elsewhere on my site. The images I post for feature are 400×267. Always. So that is not the issue. Again. I did not touch anything. All worked Yesterday afternoon. This morning it’s broken.

    https://www.auburnmassdaily.com

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/jetpack/

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)
  • Plugin Author Jeremy Herve

    (@jeherve)

    Jetpack Mechanic ??

    Sorry to hear that! I understand how frustrating that must be; it’s also frustrating for me not to be able to help you more.

    Things haven’t changed since the last time you reported the problem. Facebook still follows the same process to build a post preview and display it on Facebook.

    When you share a post on Facebook, or when Jetpack Publicize publishes a post to your Facebook page, Facebook follow these steps:

    1. First, it looks if someone already shared that post on Facebook, and if it has data about the post in its cache. If it does, it uses that data.
    2. If it’s the first time that post is being shared on Facebook, Facebook’s bot crawls the URL and looks for Open Graph Meta Tags in the <head>. (Jetpack inserts these Open Graph Meta Tags to your posts if you don’t use another Open Graph plugin to manage these tags.
    3. Here is how the tags look like for your latest post: https://i.wpne.ws/at78

      Notice the og:image tag? That’s what Facebook’s bot will look at first when trying to grab an image to be used in the post preview.

    4. The og:image tag in your last post links to the following image:
      https://auburnmassdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Kim.OBrien.Graduation-e1430872920273.jpg

      That image is large enough to be used by Facebook, I’m able to download it. It seems great.

    5. Now let’s see what Facebook has to say about it. As recommended in Facebook’s Sharing Best Practices for Websites & Mobile Apps, you can “Use the URL Debugger to debug your Open Graph tags”. Let’s see what we find there
    6. https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=http%3A%2F%2Fauburnmassdaily.com%2F2015%2F05%2F06%2Fobrien-graduates-state-firefighting-academy%2F https://i.wpne.ws/atKm
    7. As you can see, the Debugger tells us all we need to know.
    1. The og:image tag was found by Facebook’s bot, along with all the other Open Graph Meta tags that were on the page. https://i.wpne.ws/atEV
    2. Based on the raw tags, Facebook’s bot built an array of Open Graph properties that included the image: https://i.wpne.ws/asvS
    3. Yet the Shared Post displays an ad instead of the image: https://i.wpne.ws/asi1
    4. Why is that? Facebook gives us the answer at the top of the debug page:

      og:image could not be downloaded or is too small

      og:image was not defined, could not be downloaded or was not big enough. Please define a chosen image using the og:image metatag, and use an image that’s at least 200x200px and is accessible from Facebook. Image ‘https://auburnmassdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CashforClotheDouble.jpeg&#8217; will be used instead.

    5. So Facebook gives us 3 possible causes for this problem: og:image was not defined, could not be downloaded or was not big enough. We know that the first and the last reasons are not true. We’re consequently left with one explanation: could not be downloaded
    6. My next test was to ask Facebook’s bot to look at that image in particular, by entering it in Facebook Debugger
    7. https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=http%3A%2F%2Fauburnmassdaily.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2015%2F05%2FKim.OBrien.Graduation-e1430872920273.jpg – https://i.wpne.ws/atF1
    8. As you can see, the results are interesting: on one hand, Facebook tells us “Error parsing input URL, no data was cached, or no data was scraped.” On the other hand, it shows the image in the post preview on that same page!

    I can’t investigate any further than that, I’m afraid. I can’t tell you why Facebook wasn’t able to download that image, and I can’t tell you what causes the contradictory messages in Facebook’s debugger.

    It seems to happen to other people too, but I couldn’t find any real solution to that problem:
    https://goo.gl/Cj0XvZ

    Like last time, I’m afraid I can only suggest that you contact Facebook directly about this:
    https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/trending/
    Do not hesitate to link to this thread, hopefully my debugging steps and the screenshots I made will help them understand the problem.

    I would have suggested you to stop using the Publicize module and just deactivate it, but I’m afraid that wouldn’t help. The problem happens even when I share the post directly on Facebook, without going through any app, service, or sharing button:
    https://i.wpne.ws/asi9

    Thread Starter jefflabonte

    (@jefflabonte)

    Well thank you for the detailed explanation. Like you said, it doesn’t really help me fix the problem, but I do appreciate your taking the time.

    As a point of interest, I was the one who shared these posts twice – the first ones with the ad images attached I deleted, then manually posted the page link to Facebook and manually uploaded the photos I wanted to use. None of that was through Publicize.

    Again my frustration is that this is always tied to a JetPack update. Always. So I have a hard time blaming Facebook. I feel badly whining about a free and largely functional plugin. But my website has come to rely so heavily on this interaction it is nearly crippling when it breaks. Somehow, the problem resolves after some period of time. From what you’re telling me, it must be Facebook changes that eventually cause this to work again, but really that is beyond my comprehension, or desire to comprehend.

    Plugin Author Jeremy Herve

    (@jeherve)

    Jetpack Mechanic ??

    It might be worth keeping an eye on this bug report:
    https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/1565027973760906/

    It was acknowledged by Facebook yesterday evening, and seems related to the problems you’re having. Once this gets fixed, you’ll see if your issues disappear!

    This is really strange. I have exactly the same problem.
    What I have recognized:

    If I edit the post in wordpress (e.g. a blank space at the end), actualize the post and then debug the page with facebook tool, the og:image is ok.

    But publicize for the first time, the og:image misses. Though I have edited my functions.php, that a standard image should be used if og:image is blank. Even this does not work.

    As already said: Edit the post and actualize and everything is ok.

    Plugin Author Jeremy Herve

    (@jeherve)

    Jetpack Mechanic ??

    I have edited my functions.php, that a standard image should be used if og:image is blank. Even this does not work.

    @jens That seems like a different issue. Could you please start your own thread, as per the Forum Welcome?
    https://www.ads-software.com/support/plugin/jetpack#postform

    Thank you!

    Thread Starter jefflabonte

    (@jefflabonte)

    I just broke down and configured NextScripts SNAP, and Ultimatum Social Share. Everything works fine with those plug ins. So don’t know what else to say about the interaction with Publicize, Share and Facebook. It does not seem to be a problem between my site and Facebook, or a Facebook issue, if an alternate plug-in works flawlessly. At least in my mind, that right there narrows the source of the problem to Jetpack. Thanks for trying to help anyway.

    Yep its definitely Jetpack. Same thing is happening to me. But if I grab the link from my site and post it on facebook directly the right image shows. Also if I share from my mashare plugin it ALSO shows the RIGHT image…its publicize.

    I had a similar issue starting this week where jetpack had the og:image tag in there but when published to facebook it was always grabbing the wrong one until I went into facebook debugger and re-scraped the post (super annoying to do this for every article every day).

    From what i can see, jetpack is missing the og:image:width and og:image:height tags and facebook debugger now seems to throw up a warning if those tags are missing.

    Until jetpack or facebook repairs the problem I found that installing the Open Graph Protocol Framework plugin fixes the issue since it includes the image width and height tags that jetpack does not.

    Plugin Author Jeremy Herve

    (@jeherve)

    Jetpack Mechanic ??

    I just broke down and configured NextScripts SNAP, and Ultimatum Social Share. Everything works fine with those plug ins.

    I’m glad to hear that you found a work-around that works for you. It seems that by removing all Open Graph Tags from your posts you found a way to work around that Facebook bug!

    If you start experiencing issues again, you might want to install an Open Graph Management plugin like this one, as Facebook doesn’t seem very happy about the lack of Open Graph Meta tags in your posts at the moment, and will pick a random image to display alongside your posts since you didn’t define any specific Open Graph Image Tag. Here is an example with your last post:

    Yep its definitely Jetpack. Same thing is happening to me. But if I grab the link from my site and post it on facebook directly the right image shows. Also if I share from my mashare plugin it ALSO shows the RIGHT image…its publicize.

    As I mentioned earlier, the way you share your posts doesn’t matter: in all cases (Publicize, NextScripts SNAP, Jetpack Sharing Buttons, another sharing plugin, no plugin at all), Facebook follows the process I outlined above to build its previews.

    I tried sharing one of your posts manually, without using any button. I only pasted the URL in a new message on Facebook. Unfortunately the wrong image was selected by Facebook:
    https://i.wpne.ws/avQo

    Looking at Facebook Debugger for that post, I see the exact same issue reported by Jeff above: the image is correctly added to your Open Graph Meta Tags, Facebook sees it when crawling your site, but for some reason decides to ignore it when actually building the post preview.

    Facebook should have a fix for this issue in place soon, though. They’ve mentioned in the bug report that they’re working on the problem right now.

    From what i can see, jetpack is missing the og:image:width and og:image:height tags and facebook debugger now seems to throw up a warning if those tags are missing.

    These 2 tags are actually optional, and only used by Facebook to pre-cache the images:
    https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/best-practices#precaching

    We will see about adding them to the Jetpack Open Graph Image Tags, though, it’s a good idea!
    You can follow our progress here:
    https://github.com/Automattic/jetpack/issues/2104

    Thanks for the feedback!

    Thread Starter jefflabonte

    (@jefflabonte)

    Yeah but JetPack share buttons always did that too. It either grabbed the feature photo or an inline photo, but it usually wasn’t an issue until it started pulling random ads. I still liked how publicize worked better than I like SNAP, but I can’t have an ice cream ad replacing someone’s photo in an obituary. Whatever, even if it is something with graph tag things on my side, this is now working acceptably well, and the SNAP is working as it should.

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)
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