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Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love

November 7, 2012ByJesse Chen

Since last Wednesday's update, we looked back at Open Graph and Music, a Year Later, announced how to Find the Facebook team in November, and published a spotlight on Songza.

November 2012 Breaking Changes Live

As announced in August, the following breaking changes go into effect today:

  • No more payments reporting emails
  • Notifications table no longer returns pid/aid for photos/albums
  • New permission required to read Page mailboxes
  • External Page migration

For more information, see the Completed Changes section of the Roadmap.

February 2013 Breaking Changes (90-day notice)

Per our 90 day Breaking Change Policy, the following changes will go into effect on February 6th, 2013:

End of custom actions for content consumption
We will no longer show Custom Open Graph actions that were published simply by a user consuming content. If you own one of these actions and it was previously approved, you will have received an email from us. Developers should stop publishing these actions as doing so will return an error starting February 6th. The only actions that can be published upon a user simply consuming content are built-in actions. For more info, see this blog post.

Once we open up the migration some time in November, the following changes can be enabled/disabled using the "February 2013 Breaking Changes" [migration](/roadmap/migrations) until February 6th when it will go into effect permanently for everyone:

Authenticated referrals going away
We will remove the Authenticated Referrals feature. You should instead use the Auth Dialog.

Create_event permission required to remove attendees from event
We will require the create_eventpermission in order to remove attendees from an event a user admins.

Minor change to admin.getAppProperties call
When making an admin.getAppProperties call, we will now return an empty Android Key Hash field as [] instead of [""].

Canonical URLs used when fetching Open Graph objects
We will start using canonical URLs (e.g. the URL set in an og:url tag, 301/302 redirects, etc.) when fetching objects (e.g. http://graph.facebook.com?ids=http://developers.facebook.com).

Offset no longer allowed when searching posts
We will no longer allow the offset parameter to be used when searching stream posts (e.g. https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=watermelon&type=post). Please use since and until to do paging instead. For more info, check out this blog post.

Curly bracket syntax for mentioning users in notifications going away
We will no longer allow the curly bracket syntax ({USER_ID}) for mentioning users in notifications. Developers should instead use the new syntax (@[USER_ID]).

Removing ability to post to friends walls via Graph API
We will remove the ability to post to a user's friends' walls via the Graph API. Specifically, posts against [user_id]/feed where [user_id] is different from the session user, or stream.publish calls where the target_id user is different from the session user, will fail. 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). For more info, see this blog post.

The following change can be enabled/disabled using the "Picture as Dictionary" [migration](/roadmap/migrations) until February 6th when it will go into effect permanently for everyone:

Picture connection/field may return a dictionary
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, a redirect=false parameter, or getting the picture field as part of a larger JSON response.

For more information, check out the Developer Roadmap.

Weekly stats

The following stats are for activity between noon Wednesday, October 31 and noon Wednesday, November 7.

Bugs activity between Wednesday, October 31 and Wednesday, November 7

  • 229 bugs were reported
  • 29 bugs were reproducible and accepted (after duplicates removed)
  • 6 bugs were by design
  • 33 bugs were fixed
  • 44 bugs were duplicate, invalid, or need more information

Bugs fixed between Wednesday, October 31 and Wednesday, November 7

Activity on facebook.stackoverflow.com

  • 343 questions asked
  • 90 questions with a score of 0 or greater
  • 31 answered, 26% answered rate
  • 58 replied, 64% reply rate