mitchellalerts

I don’t know if there is a way to rollback the Yoast plugin in WordPress, but you can download a ZIP file of an older version of Yoast and manually overwrite the the yoast_seo folder and it’s contents in the plugins directory in the filesystem. Anyways, rolling Yoast back to an older version should take care of the problem for now until Yoast releases an update patching the bug.

My Yoast was behaving just fine under the latest version of WordPress until I chose to update plugins through the WP Dashboard.

I am experiencing the same problem since updating the Yoast plugin. Here is my workaround for the moment.

Type the data you plan to place in the fields into another place, such as Notepad. Next copy the data for one of the fields to the clipboard. Depending on the data you placed in the clipboard, click on the meta title or description under “Snippet Preview” then press CTRL+V on your keyboard. Repeat for the second field, if necessary.

If the changes annoy you as much as they annoy me, I have found a way to get your titles to post without having to “Custom Message” every time, especially if you’re using the mobile platform and Custom Message is not an option.

Here’s what I have been forced to do, as I find this to be quicker than having to go in Facebook and clean up the mess Publicize leaves behind:

Create your post in WordPress just like you normally would, choosing your category and adding tags and everything. Before publishing your new post, cut the text from the body and then Publish it. Yes, you just created a new post with an empty body. This forces Publicize to use only the data in the title like before! Then edit the post you just created and paste the body back into it and “Update” it.

You’re welcome!!!!!

If the changes annoy you as much as they annoy me, I have found a way to get your titles to post without having to “Custom Message” every time.

Here’s what I do:

Create your post in WordPress just like you normally would, choosing your category and adding tags and everything. Before publishing your new post, cut the text from the body and then Publish. Yes, you just created a new post with an empty body. This forces Publicize to use only the data in the title like before! Then edit the post you just created and paste the body back into it and “Update” it.

This problem started a few weeks back when Jetpack changed the backend of Publicize where the body of the messages were used instead of titles. I guess it was a bug they created and from the way it looks it is not going to be fixed.

heymrdj27:

This is not an error, this is normally what you would see when you try to connect WordPress to a Facebook page. Facebook requires that all posts made to your Facebook page be by way of a personal Facebook account. When you are on Facebook, they already know your personal account, but when you use a 3rd party web page that interfaces with Facebook, in an effort to protect your identity, only the Facebook page name is made available. But you are logged in as the page, Publicize is seeing the Facebook page and its ID as the account, not your personal account and its ID.

Because content that gets posted to your Facebook page, whether you post it using the Facebook page or through something else that is connected to the Facebook page, those posts actually gets passed through your personal account. This way, if content you post to the Facebook page gets reported due to breaking the Facebook law, then the FB police will know which admin on the page made the post, and take appropriate action against that person’s account, not every page admin. Things work differently though when you get a 3rd party web page involved. Facebook only provides the page name and it’s ID when you are signed in and acting as the Facebook page, instead of your personal page, or making both available to the 3rd party site. This is to protect your privacy as the admin of the page from 3rd party pages. So the process is opposite.

First, you switch back to your personal account, then create the link. Then the 3rd party site scrapes Facebook for available pages you’ve been granted permission to make posts to. You’ll be able to choose from your personal account or any Facebook page where you are at least the Editor. Once you select the page, then Publicize knows to publicize the posts you make to WordPress using your WP account through your personal name, then to the page. The post makes it to Facebook, and Facebook knows it was your personal Facebook account that posted it.

So you have your WordPress linked to Facebook now. Great! Now it’s to plan how posts created by others on your WordPress page will be handled. How you choose to do this is entirely up to you, but I’ll try to explain the best way I know how the advantages and disadvantages of each method. I recommend you give this thought, and make the choice that you feel will meet your needs down the road.

If you personally know and trust all the people that will be posting content to your WordPress page, and you are comfortable with the posts they make to your WordPress page, and you are not worried about your personal Facebook account being attached as the owner when they are publicized to the Facebook page, or you have people posting to the WordPress page and you want their posts publicized and you don’t want them to be an admin of the Facebook page, or you have people posting on the WordPress page that don’t have Facebook accounts, after you make the connection to the page, you’ll want to put a checkmark next to “Make this connection available to all users of this blog” and that’s it! You’re good to go! All posts made on the WordPress page from now on and forever until you break the connection, or you are removed from the Facebook page by another admin, will go to the Facebook page. Here’s the downside: If one of the people’s accounts gets compromised on your WordPress page, or one of your people gets angry, and their WordPress account makes a post that would violate Facebook’s Community Standards, and the publicized post gets reported to Facebook, YOUR FACEBOOK ACCOUNT WILL BE SUBJECT TO FACEBOOK DISCIPLINE UP TO TERMINATION.

So if the thought of that worries you, then you will not want to check that box making your connection available to all users. Instead, you will need to ensure each person on your WordPress page is also an admin on the Facebook page, and each person will need to follow the steps of creating their own connections for their posts to be publicized through. That way, if someone gets hacked, or goes rogue on you, and something bad gets posted to your WordPress page, it won’t be so bad. Their bad posts get reported, their Facebook account is placed on the chopping block, and you can delete bad post on the WordPress page (and hopefully remove their access to your WordPress blog too), and life is good.

Of course, your mileage may vary!

Likewise! Hopefully our persistent presence in these forums will help out!

Yes, custom text seems to be working correctly if you choose Custom Text. But when custom text is not chosen, Publicize is still scraping for content from the body of the message, not choosing the title, as many of us have come accustomed to.

This is beginning to become a huge nuisance, as most of my posts are done using the mobile app, and I am having to delete the post Publicize creates and make my own just to have title and URL only.

Also the shortlinks problem still remains unresolved.

I think you missed what I tried to say here. I, too, use short links (wp.me) but since introduction of changes on the backend of Publicize, ALL shortlinks are no longer working, and instead the full links are being used.

sevago, short URL’s has been broken since Jetpack silently pushed out new updates on their backend the other day.

This was mentioned in another thread along with other issues and concerns which you can read here:

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/publicize-ignoring-custom-text-on-facebook/

I am not sure if this is the right place to discuss the Publicize Theme customization or not, but wanted to also throw this idea out there.

In my last post discussing the theme and the variables within, I think it would be good to limit a post body by either the number of characters, or by the number of paragraphs.

Maybe the variable could be formatted something like this

limit(#)(%post(#)%)

Where: limit(#) would limit the number of characters
And %post($)% would limit the number of paragraphs.

So if someone wanted to limit the number of characters, say by the first 300 characters found, but not by paragraph, they could use a code similar to:

limit(300)(%post%)

If someone wanted to limit the post by, say the first paragraph, they could use the code similar to:

%post(1)%

If someone wanted the first 300 characters found when constrained to the first paragraph, they could use code similar to:

limit(300)(%post(1)%)

And of course, if they want the entire article, then they would omit the numbers from the variables out entirely.

%post%

In my case, usually my first paragraph is a short and brief description of what is to follow. Details begin to unravel in the second paragraph and beyond. So, what I envision as a viable solution for me would be:

%post(1)%

Read more: %url%

This would post the first paragraph, and drop two lines and then put “Read More:” with a link back to the article, where readers could get the full story.

I think we can all agree that the main point of Publicize is to mirror just enough of our WordPress posts to our Facebook pages about a particular story to bait and hook readers interest into what we’ve written, then drive them over from Facebook to our WordPress sites by having them click the link in order to read the remainder of the substance of the post, which in my case is the extra details of a fire/medical/police dispatch call, or a news story. At the same time, keeping things clean, neat and professional looking. Just like in Miri’s Facebook post earlier, and from what I’ve seen, the way things are currently being handled looks so sloppy and unprofessional. Plus, nobody is going to click the links to read the stories on our WordPress pages if they don’t absolutely have to, that much I have personally discovered, and is also true from my personal experience. We all have our reasons as to why we want the traffic off Facebook to the page. In my case, there’s two reasons. I use the analytics from Facebook to measure the “Link Clicks” to find out exactly how many of the “reached users” are actually reading the articles, and exposing those people to advertisements that, hopefully with time, will pay for overhead (servers, datacenter costs, etc.) and provide an income to those of us that are contributing to the page by posting relevant content.

To give update, the “Custom Text” field when a post is made from a PC is working properly like before. I click Edit and the title is already populated and I don’t have to do anything else. However, the “wp.me” short links has not worked since you guys rolled out this new update.

… But still doesn’t solve my problem when I do this with the WordPress iPhone App … LoL …

Glad to see, nonetheless, we are making progress to getting things back to the way we envision them working.:)

Thanks for your assistance and time you invest into making the Plugins functional for those of us who use and depend on them to help us simplifly managing the Facebook side of our pages.

Thanks for trying to make the plugin work to meet our needs. Unfortunately in my situation, most my posts are done on the WordPress app on my smartphone, and there is no option to set custom text through this method I have yet to find.

I still think restoring the posting on the backend to the way it was in regards to the text would be ideal for now until a better solution is implemented where the end user can choose what they want, even if the solution would be an update in the Publicize plugin where a user has a static choice between the two available options (Title URL image) or (Body URL image). Or maybe some workaround PHP code that we can throw into the source code ourselves to make it do what we want. (Don’t worry— I’m completely comfortable getting my hands dirty working with the PHP code)

I think the greatest part of WordPress, in general, is everyone’s ability to easily customize every aspect the way their site looks and works. I know I have put a lot of time into playing with different themes and then finding one that closely matches my vision for my site, then modifying the plugin and theme PHP files to have the site to meet the remainder of my needs. But there is no way to customize the way Publicize is handled. I think this would be a great opportunity for your team to explore creating the ability to use Publicize templates. It might even be a good way for your team to generate some extra revenue to offset your time creating this ability by having a “Publicize Pro” where, if someone wants to deviate from the default template (which I would leave as the title url image since that is what everyone has come accustomed to and since, let’s face it, the beginning of the body is scraped by Facebook and included in the link to read anyhow, making it’s inclusion in the actual post rather redundant) then they could pay to play.

https://www.facebook.com/MitchellAlerts/posts/1592244027690035
https://mitchellalerts.com/?p=941

https://www.facebook.com/MitchellAlerts/posts/1592199127694525
https://mitchellalerts.com/?p=922

I can produce many, many, many, many, many more.

Why is the longer not desirable? Here’s the best way I can describe it. My site is pretty new, but has a large following within my community. Part of the goal is to sell advertising to local businesses to run the site and income for those of us running the site. Things have worked great so far. The title of the post on WordPress goes to Facebook, and then the details are in the actual post, which people click. This allows us to expose users to ads. If Publicize posts the entire post to Facebook, then why would people click the link to read it? They are no longer being exposed to advertisements that they otherwise would have been by going to the page. Also, when I go to “Custom Text” and Publicize adds additional text to the post, then I feel as if the wishes of Custom Text are being ignored, since, text that was not in the Custom Text field is being added to the post.

Here is my suggestion. Push an updated version of JetPack with a newer Publicize where the end user can customize the way that their site pushes content to Facebook. This would give everyone the best of both worlds. Those of us that want short the titles only, get titles only. Those that want more can get more, they are in control.

Example:
%title%
%post%
%post(#)%
%url%

So if someone wants the title and URL, then they could set Publicize up with:

%title% %url%

Then, if someone wants to customize it a little, like how I would really like it to show on my Facebook page, then the end user can modify it to their heart’s content and wishes.

%title%

Details: %url%

See this link for an example of how this modified code would look: https://www.facebook.com/MitchellAlerts/posts/1592234997690938

Or if someone wants the entire post from Publicize to Facebook:

%post%

%url%

Or if someone only wants, say the first 300 characters of an their post,

%post(300)%

%url%

I think you see where I’m going here, and quite honestly, this is how you should handle it. That way each person can decide how Publicize interacts with Facebook. Then if someone goes to Custom Text, then that would COMPLETELY override their Publicize settings and the Custom Text would be posted to Facebook instead. No additional data added to the post, or any stripped.

This is not possible. The only way to “update” your post once it makes it to Facebook is to go to your page and edit the post by hand.

Hope this helps!