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Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love

July 18, 2012ByEric Osgood

Since last Wednesday's update, we published a game spotlight on SongPop and shared guidance on how to capture growth by leveraging photos and the Open Graph.

Javascript SDK Cleanup

In the continued effort to reduce the number of unofficial methods exposed by the Javascript SDK, we recently sent out an email to app developers who we believe are using such methods.

If you received such an email please make sure that you review your codebase. This is easiest done by using the app and looking at the developer console in the browser. Some of you might have received this email for no apparent reason, (some sites 'borrow' app_id's from other apps, developers try out things), and to you we apologize for the inconvenience.

'Translate your app' link moving into the Localize tab

We recently launched a new tab, "Localize", in the App Dashboard. Developers can use this tab to submit translated assets for App Center, as well as any other content that can be translated in their app. As a result we have also moved the "Translate your app" link into this tab accordingly, now available under "Advanced Options".

Facebook at Casual Connect Seattle

If you're planning to attend Casual Connect Seattle next week, join us for talks from members of the games product and partnerships teams:

Unlock new frontiers of growth with Facebook
Tuesday, July 24th at 11:00am in the Taper Auditorium
Sara Brooks, Games Strategic Partner Manager, will share insight on new frontiers of growth across geographies, genres and platforms for Facebook games developers, while delving into success stories from developers.

Growing social games across mobile and web with Facebook
Wednesday, July 25th at 10:00am in the Recital Hall
Matt Wyndowe, Games & Apps Product Manager, will discuss how Facebook can be a primary growth engine for your mobile game and showcase examples of how Facebook helped fuel massive growth for FreshPlanet's music recognition game, SongPop.

October 2012 breaking changes (90-day notice)

The following changes will go into effect on October 3rd, 2012:

Built-in like/follow action required
We will stop allowing the use of Custom Open Graph "like" and "follow" actions now that there are built-in "like" and built-in "follow" actions. Please convert any custom "like" or "follow" actions you may have created to instead use the built-in "like" or "follow" actions.

Removing Bookmark URL - Originally scheduled for December 1, 2011
As mentioned on the blog, this optional field was originally created to help developers track user referrals from app bookmarks. We now pass a ref parameter to let you know that the user is coming from a bookmark (i.e. ref=bookmarks). As such, we will remove the "Bookmark URL" field from the apps settings.

The following change can be enabled/disabled using the "Remove offline_access" migration until October 3rd when it will go into effect permanently for everyone:

offline_access permission removal
The offline_accesspermission is deprecated and will be removed October 3rd, 2012 (originally scheduled for July 5th). Please see the Removal of offline_access Permission doc for more details.

The following changes can all be enabled/disabled using the "October 2012 Breaking Changes" migration until October 3rd when they will go into effect permanently for everyone:

Removing Live Stream plugin
The Live Stream plugin has been deprecated and will render the Comments Box plugin in its place. While it offers similar functionality, there are a few functional differences. Please see the Live Stream plugin documentation for more info.

Summary field being replaced by description field
Because the two fields were somewhat redundant, we will be removing the "Summary" field (found in the "Auth Dialog" section of an app's settings) and instead using the "Description" field (found in the "Advanced" section of an app's settings) in places where "Summary" was previously used.

Removing position field for photos
The position field in both the photo FQL table as well as the Photo Graph API object will start returning 0 for all photos. The photos connection on an Album object in the Graph API will continue to return photos in the order they appear in the album. FQL queries on the photo table that have a WHERE clause containing the aid or album_object_id columns will return in the correct order as well without needing an ORDER BY position clause.

/picture connection will return a JSONP dictionary when a callback is specified
We will start returning a dictionary containing the fields url, height, width, and is_silhouette when accessing the /picture connection for an object and specifying a callback property. Currently we just return the picture URL as a string.

Weekly Stats

The following stats are for activity between Wednesday, July 11th and Wednesday, July 18th.

Bugs activity between Wednesday, July 11 and Wednesday, July 18

  • 206 bugs were reported
  • 48 bugs were reproducible and accepted (after duplicates removed)
  • 13 bugs were by design
  • 19 bugs were fixed
  • 84 bugs were duplicate, invalid, or need more information

Bugs fixed between Wednesday, July 11 and Wednesday, July 18

Activity on facebook.stackoverflow.com between Wednesday, July 11 and Wednesday, July 18

  • 461 questions asked
  • 349 questions with a score of 0 or greater
  • 95 answered, 27% answered rate
  • 174 replied, 50% reply rate