New Rules for News Feed

As part of the user experience improvements we announced yesterday, we're changing the rules for how Feed stories can be published with the feed.publishTemplatizedAction API method. The new policy moving forward will be that this function should only be used to publish actions actively taken by the "actor" mentioned in the story. As an example, feed stories that say things like "John has received a present" are no longer acceptable. The product motivation behind this change is that Feed is a place to publish highly relevant stories about user activity, rather than passive stories promoting an application. <br/><br/> To foster this intended behavior, we are changing the way the function works: the "actor_id" parameter will be ignored. Instead the session_key used to generate the feed story will be used as the actor. Since previously the actor_id could be set to be a page_id, we'll now support a new parameter for Facebook Pages: page_actor_id. You are encouraged to switch over to the new parameters right now, though we'll continue to support the "actor_id" parameter for the next month to allow you time to transition. The PHP client library and the documentation have been updated to reflect the new version of the function. <br/><br/> Although we will continue to support the old parameter for the next month to allow you time to update your code as necessary, we appreciate your responsiveness in eliminating "non-active" usage of feed stories as soon as possible. In order to ensure a high quality experience for users, starting 9am Pacific time Tuesday 22 January we may contact you, or in severe cases initiate an enforcement action, if your stories are not complying with the new policy, especially if the volume of non-complying stories is high.