Web developers/designers like BizzyWeb have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. We love the platform. We love what Facebook can do and how it helps connect people to each other and to businesses. We love that the tools Facebook makes available are largely easy to use and easy for our customers to work with. However, we don’t like that Facebook sometimes makes changes and doesn’t provide much notice (like the recent Timeline for business pages), or doesn’t notify the web community of the changes at all.
Two of our newer clients have recently reported seeing “Publishing on Facebook failed” error messages when publishing a blog post. Sometimes the blog post would auto-publish to Facebook and other times it would not.
As soon as we were made aware of the problem, we contacted the developers of the auto-publishing plugin we use to fix the problem. The root cause was tracked down to a recent “stealth update” by Facebook that changed their offline authentication policy. This policy change is e affecting multiple Facebook apps that rely on offline authentications to communicate with Facebook.
The problem was summarized well by brianw on the WPMUdev forums:
To successfully post to a page (not a profile), you will have to be logged into Facebook, with an account that has administrative privileges over the page he/she wishes to post to.
Unfortunately, that only works for two hours. After that, the token expires.
Unless it’s been less than two hours since you last posted to Faceook, you will need to re-login to both before publishing a blog post or the auto-publishing won’t work. This problem appears to only be affecting those who have started publishing to Facebook within the last 2 months. Older sites appear to be unaffected.
If you are a current BizzyWeb client and are getting the “Publishing on Facebook failed” error message, please log a ticket at http://www.bizzyweb.com/support/request-for-support/. We will keep you posted as we find out more.
Than you for your patience and understanding,
Vincent Wondra
Vice President – Operations
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