Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love

Since last Wednesday's update, we explained how to grow quality apps with Open Graph, announced the events we will be attending in October and explained how to make a social impact with Facebook.

New Open Graph changes announced

As announced this week:

• We will remove the Authenticated Referrals feature. You should instead use the Auth Dialog.

• We will remove the ability to post to a user's friends' walls via the Graph API. If you want to allow people to post to their friends' timelines, invoke the feed dialog. Stories that include friends via user mentions tagging or action tagging will show up on the friend’s timeline (assuming the friend approves the tag).

• We will no longer show Custom Open Graph actions that are published simply by a user consuming content. Developers should stop publishing these actions. The only actions that can be published upon a user simply consuming content are built-in actions.

More time to migrate to Graph API picture field change

On October 3rd, as planned, we enabled a change which caused the picture Graph API connection/field to return a dictionary in some situations. Despite us following our 90-day breaking change policy, some developers seem to have still been caught off guard by this change. We have decided to give developers a little more than 90 more days to prepare their apps for this change. To roll your app back to the old functionality while you work on updating your app, simply change the "Picture as Dictionary" migration (will be available Friday) to "Disabled". This migration will be enabled permanently for everyone on February 6th, 2013.

For more information on this change, check out the Developer Roadmap. We usually will not be able to give more time for previously announced changes so we strongly encourage you to keep an eye on the Roadmap to make sure you're prepared for upcoming changes. Per our 90-day breaking change policy, we will always announce here in these Wednesday "Platform Updates" blog posts all breaking changes 90 days in advance.

Javascript SDK reminder

As mentioned earlier, we will now start removing internal features from the publicly available interface of the JavaScript SDK. If you want to check if you are using any internal features, their usage is currently being logged to the console.

January 2013 breaking changes

The following change will go into effect on January 9th, 2013. Please note that January 9th is the second Wednesday of the month, not the first Wednesday of the month as is normally the case per our Breaking Change Policy. This is due to the fact that January 2nd is a company holiday so our standard Tuesday push will be delayed.

Removing unused splash_screen_url and gamebar_image_url properties
We will remove the splash_screen_url and gamebar_image_urlapp properties as these are no longer used anywhere so setting them will have no effect.

The following changes can all be enabled/disabled using the "January 2013 Breaking Changes" migration until January 9th when they will go into effect permanently for everyone:

Removing Dashboard REST API methods
We will remove all of the dashboard.* REST API methods. This was originally scheduled for June 2012 as announced in December 2011. To manage counts for your app, see the Requests documentation or this blog post.

Using canonical URLs when fetching data using link_stat table
When getting stats about a URL (e.g. number of likes) from the link_stat FQL table or by passing a URL to the ids parameter in a Graph API call, we will now use the canonicalized URL to fetch those stats. This fixes a few issues. For example, getting stats for developers.facebook.com and developers.facebook.com?foo=bar currently could return different values for shares. This change will ensure they return the same values since they in fact point to the same page.

Check out the Developer Roadmap for all updates on breaking changes.

Weekly stats

The following stats are for activity between Wednesday, October 3 and Wednesday, October 10:

Bugs activity

• 182 bugs were reported
• 17 bugs were reproducible and accepted (after duplicates removed)
• 3 bugs were by design
• 28 bugs were fixed
• 32 bugs were duplicate, invalid, or need more information

Bugs fixed

• Mobile Web FConnect redirect to page not found
• Like Button Broken on iPad
• fb:like on hover like button become wider
• Subscription Renewal > Players are being charged multiple times
• college_networks must be supplied with ID and name, not just the name as mentionned
• xfbml login-button yields 404 error from facebook
• Login button classes behave differently on mobile browsers
• Graph API missing fields for fanpage & application
• Facebook Connect login results in page not found on mobile devices.
• FBPlacePickerViewController sometimes crashes if "October 2012 Breaking Changes" enabled
• Testers within a group cannot connect to app while in sandbox
• Developers Apps page not loading
• Unable to submit requested screenshots for active, custom Open Graph action for mobile
• Test users can't have non-English names
• setAutoGrow(); / Canvas Height Fixed to - Doesn't work
• Like Button didnt work
• Cannot add more info to a bug
• Error Message: Something Went Wrong With Your Access Token
• story_tags id returns integer instead of string
• Mobile comments color scheme
• Impossible to Make Under-18 Test Users
• Create New Group not listing friends
• Empty Responses from Post API - Photo Posts
• Graph explorer throwing js error
• Intermittent failures on credit callback for payments_get_items
• Recommendation Box bugged link color
• the javascript sdk loading is not always working!
• Facepile dark color scheme doesn't work

Activity on facebook.stackoverflow.com

• 447 questions asked
• 349 questions with a score of 0 or greater
• 101 answered, 29% answered rate
• 193 replied, 55% reply rate