Nursing RSS Graffiti

Facebook's permission system is changing

Mon, 07 May 2012 23:19:11 +0200

Under a new Facebook policy, you must log into RSS Graffiti (or any other app) at least once every 60 days to renew its access to your profile and groups. Unless you visit the app at least this often, its authorization to publish to your profile and groups will expire. The good news is, our contact at Facebook has confirmed that access to pages can still be granted indefinitely, so if you only use RSS Graffiti to publish to pages, visit http://beta.rssgraffiti.com now and hit refresh to automatically grant RSS Graffiti a permanent access token.

Please understand the security considerations that motivated this change in Facebook’s policies; the new rules will help protect accounts from unwanted intrusion by malicious 3rd party apps. For more info from Facebook regarding the deprecation of permanent permissions, see http://developers.facebook.com/roadmap/offline-access-removal and if you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions about this new policy, please reach out to us via http://getsatisfaction.com/rssgraffiti2

Upgrade Complete

Wed, 02 May 2012 01:34:31 +0200

The RSS Graffiti 2.0 servers are now posting more than 20 pieces of content to Facebook every second. Pretty impressive, right?
Aside from the shiny new UI, version 2.0 should behave almost exactly like 1.9 for the vast majority of users. If you think you’ve found a bug we missed, please let us know! When reporting an issue to our community support forum be sure to mention any errors displayed in your RSS Graffiti activity log, accessed via the bar graph icon at the top right of each publishing plan. Until we integrate version 2.0 into the Facebook application canvas (our next priority), your RSS Graffiti settings can be configured off-site at beta.rssgraffiti.com.
The RSS Graffiti team truly appreciates the support from everyone who has given us feedback during the upgrade process. The best is yet to come!

Here we go!

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 01:20:00 +0200

As promised, RSS Graffiti 2.0 is now available to everyone. To upgrade your account, visit http://apps.facebook.com/rssgraffiti and click OK!

IMPORTANT: After you upgrade, any permissions errors shown on the 1.9 application canvas can be safely ignored. Your feeds will be configurable at http://beta.rssgraffiti.com until after the upgrade is complete for all users.

ALSO IMPORTANT: The rssgraffiti.com support docs are currently inaccessible. If you need assistance, please open a thread in our community support forum.

Next week, RSS Graffiti 2.0 will be available to all users

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 01:43:13 +0200

In response to Facebook rolling out the “enhanced” permissions dialogue (the cause of the “Allow Publishing: Pending” error) to all new pages, starting next week all users will be offered the option to upgrade to RSS Graffiti 2.0, which contains a fix for this problem. The option to upgrade will be accessible in the 1.9 application, and we’ll post another announcement next week when it’s actually deployed.

It is important to note that when you upgrade, any pages or groups you co-administrate will not be configurable by the other admins until they too upgrade to 2.0. Therefore, make sure to communicate with your fellow admins before you make the switch.

2.0 Upgrade Update

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 23:44:36 +0200

Today, we will begin automatically upgrading users to RSS Graffiti 2.0. You will no longer have the option to delay the switch. If you receive an app notification or email from us, it means you and your targets have already been upgraded, and you can configure your publishing settings at http://beta.rssgraffiti.com/

This should come as great news for anyone experiencing the “endless permissions loop” error, as this has been fixed in the new version. It will take a few weeks to get everyone upgraded, so if you’re seeing this error and haven’t yet received an upgrade notice, please be patient! Have any questions, comments or concerns? Open a thread in our community forum at http://getsatisfaction.com/rssgraffiti2 and someone from our team will assist.

2.0 Upgrade Status & Permissions Fix

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 19:25:25 +0200

Starting this week, users who don’t have any shared targets are being upgraded to 2.0. If you are in this upgrade batch, you’ll be shown the invitation next time you access the app. Please note that the upgrade is no longer optional. From now on, if you have been sent an invite, you will only be able to configure your feeds using beta.rssgraffiti.com

Regarding the permissions-granting issue: Facebook recently began implementing an “enhanced” authorization dialog to about 5-10% of users. The problem was that the main permission we were requesting which allowed us to publish to fan pages was silently not being granted. To resolve this, we had to revise some of our publishing code to use a different permission, which required a few days to complete.

The fix is complete, and 2.0 users should now be able to publish to fan pages without the “endless permissions loop” problem. For those still on 1.9.6, bear with us! We want to be as thorough as possible in the upgrade process to make absolutely sure no one’s publishing is interrupted. We apologize for the delay and appreciate your patience and feedback in helping us resolve this frustrating bug!

Tomorrow's Timeline Deadline

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 04:01:24 +0200

Procrastinators! Ready or not, Facebook is switching all pages to timeline tomorrow (March 30th). Since a few of you asked, we want to assure everyone that RSS Graffiti is compatible with timeline, so feel free to make the switch before the deadline.

Keep in mind posts will be placed on the timeline according to when RSS Graffiti published them, not when they were originally written. If you’ve used the app to publish articles from the past, you may want to manually change the date of these posts in Facebook so they appear at the appropriate point on your timeline. Now get to it!

Regarding the outstanding permission-granting issue: If you are part of the small percentage of users who can’t grant publishing permissions to RSS Graffiti, please be patient while we work on a solution. We’ll make an announcement soon with an update on the status of the fix. -Seth

2.0 Migration Schedule

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 02:07:32 +0100

In February we announced RSS Graffiti 2.0 was going to be rolled out slowly in preparation for a global release. We are happy to report the initial beta period was a success, and so far we have received an overwhelmingly positive response from beta testers using the new version.

This week we will open up RSS Graffiti 2.0 to another batch of existing users, chosen based on how they use the application. At this stage the upgrade will be available on a purely opt-in basis. The purpose of this gradual roll-out is to ensure that everyone’s feeds continue to publish without interruption. Once we are confident these users have been upgraded successfully, a much larger batch of users will be migrated to 2.0.

We will eventually require all remaining 1.9.6 users to upgrade. It will be worth the wait; RSS Graffiti 2.0 offers improvements that will expand the power and usability of the application. With this release you can expect an increase in speed and greater control over how & where your feeds are published.

Have questions? if you’re already using RSS Graffiti 2.0, we set up a new GetSatisfaction community support forum to help with any 2.0-specific issues you might encounter. Rest assured, we will continue to support users on 1.9.6 until the migration is complete. If you are using 1.9.6, you can always find help on our 1.9 forum.

RSS Graffiti 2.0

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:28:25 +0100

We have some big news to share: This month we will be rolling out RSS Graffiti 2.0. This will be a major update, containing improvements that will expand the power and usability of the application. With this release you can expect an increase in speed and greater control over how & where your feeds are published. The RSS Graffiti team has been hard at work on this update, and when you see what’s in store, we think you’ll be just as excited as we are.

We will begin rolling out RSS Graffiti 2.0 on a purely opt-in basis, during which time users can continue using 1.9.6 if they so desire. If you have any questions about the coming 2.0 update, please leave a comment on this post. As always, if you are having any trouble using the application, direct your support questions to our GetSatisfaction.com forum.

We are moving! (to a new fan page)

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:03:18 +0100

As Facebook’s deadline for phasing-out App Profile Pages approaches, we are about to migrate RSS Graffiti’s own App Profile Page to our new Fan Page.

The URL of our page will remain the same (http://facebook.com/RSS.Graffiti). Likes will also be migrated automatically so you won’t miss any important updates we will be sending out in the future.

This makes it the last post to appear on our old App Profile Page then! See you all, on our new Fan Page! Thanks to everyone for all the discussions and feedback we had on our App Profile’s wall and thanks for all the great reviews you’ve given us!

P.S: To migrate our feeds, we will be using our own new little migration feature, so if you are an App admin and didn’t do your migration yet, then you might want to try it.

Facebook is phasing out App Profile Pages. Here is how we can help you.

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 02:25:16 +0100

Facebook has recently announced that they are going to be removing App Profile Pages by February 1st, 2012. If you administer a Facebook Application, this is important news for you and probably you already know about this for several days or weeks now. If you need more info on this then you can look at Facebook’s own post here.

Now, we know that many of you use RSS Graffiti to publish your feeds on your App Profile Pages. Assuming that you are planning to create a new Fan Page to replace your old App Profile Page (many of you probably already did that), we thought it would be nice if we could lend you a helping hand (especially those last-minute-type-of-admins that need to hurry-up to meet the Feb 1st Facebook deadline). So we’ve put together a nice little utility option in RSS Graffiti to help you make the switch.

Here is how it works:

Let’s say you have a Facebook App called “Super App”. Let’s also say that you just created a new Fan Page named “Super App Fan Page” and assigned it to the Brand/App category. Finally, let’s say that you got 4 feeds added to your “Super App” App Profile Page in RSS Graffiti. Now you want to move those 4 feeds, out of the App Profile Page and into your new “Super App Fan Page”, so that your fans continue to get your news after you make the switch. But you don’t want to re-enter them in RSS Graffiti one by one. You’d love to just click a button, move them all over and be done with it.

To move the feeds without having to re-create every feed manually, you can now go to RSS Graffiti and select either your “Super App” App Profile Page or your “Super App Fan Page”. RSS Graffiti will -sort of magically- detect that you intend to move the feeds from the App Profile to the Fan Page and offer to do it for you.

The message it gives you is pretty self-explanatory for a Facebook App admin so there is not much point in explaining more here. It’s a yellow box that appears before your feeds. Your can’t miss it. If you have questions or doubts don’t hesitate to ask either in the comments of this post or (preferably) in our user support forum on GetSatisfaction.

Some words of caution: As soon as you click on the Migrate Button and confirm the operation on the pop-up dialog that will appear, your feeds will be removed from the App Profile Page immediately and will be added to your new Fan Page. RSS Graffiti will then start publishing them on your new Fan Page. We don’t provide you with a way to move them back to the App Profile Page. So only do it when you are ready for it.

For those who care about detail, here is a bit more on how we match Apps to Fan Pages:

If you navigate to the settings of a Fan Page in RSS Graffiti, then the app will check if the Fan Page is of the proper “Brand/App” category as required by Facebook. If it is, it will then look for any App Profile Pages that you own, which have a similar name with your Fan Page. If it finds at least one App Profile with a similar name, that also has at least one feed added in it, then RSS Graffiti will prompt you to move the feed(s) from one of your relevant App Profiles to the Fan Page.

Similarly if you navigate to an App Profile Page in RSS Graffiti, then the app will check if you also have any Fan Pages of the “Brand/App” category that have a similar name with your Application. If it finds any, it will prompt you to move your feeds there.

We hope this helps! We’ll migrate our own App Profile Page this way in a few days too…

A round-up on today's attack

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 01:59:43 +0200

Many of our users, (especially the ones using Google Chrome) have stumbled upon a puzzling warning message today while trying to access RSS Graffiti. The message was saying that RSS Graffiti is suspicious for distributing malware and that the user should not proceed in using the site.

For the curious -and for the record- here is what happened: Yesterday (August 24th) a new exploit was found for a WordPress theme framework. It so happened that we have purchased a theme based on that framework and we have been using it for our WordPress based site (http://www.rssgraffiti.com).

Unfortunately, shortly after the new exploit was found, someone had the opportunity to use the exploit and infect our WordPress site. This resulted in Google’s crawlers downloading the content, noticing the suspicious JavaScript and black-listing the site immediately. As a result everyone using Google Chrome was getting this red horror warning a few hours later.

Actually blacklisting our WordPress site and giving you that warning was a good thing from Google Chrome. It would be good for us too if they could just block access to the infected site. Unfortunately for us, instead of blocking only the suspicious site, Google blacklisted the entire rssgraffiti.com domain and so any server that was under our domain was causing the same warning to appear. Users were alarmed and everyone here was out of the meeting rooms (at last) and helping each other to find and fix the problem.

Our product site (http://www.rssgraffiti.com) is just another WordPress site. It is totally isolated from our data center. The issue that affected the WordPress site had no impact on the health of our systems. The processing engine and the entire RSS Graffiti service and infrastructure continued to work during this crisis unaffected. What blocked your access to these systems was this browser warning which was issued automatically for any of our servers regardless if they were suspicious or not.

So, after seeing the error reports many of you sent in today, Dimitris, Viral and Aleks got on top of it and pinpointed the cause of the issue. We found the hack and found the patch; then removed the hack and applied the patch. The site was fixed. Then we had to get Google to lift the ban. Ryan called all the right numbers and pulled all the strings he could pull to help this process go fast forward. So that’s done now too. I’m not sure if you can really pull any string at Google. I’ll ask Ryan later. :-)

Any lessons? How can a hack on a WordPress theme affect an entire service like this? Well, in case of Google and Google Chrome it turns out it can. Don’t get me wrong here; Google Chrome is my favorite browser. Nevertheless blacklisting the entire domain seems like an overkill too me. I don’t know. I’m not going to jump into conclusions here. This is over. We’ll try to to think what we can do on our side to minimize the chances anything like this happens again.

Thank you all for being so patient and supportive!

New Support Tab on our Facebook!

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 01:34:00 +0200

New Support Tab on our Facebook!:

Hello All!

First, we would like to thank you all once again for your patience during last week’s issue with saving your feeds. As you know, we are extremely dedicated to our users and want to make sure we can give you the best service possible and answer whatever questions you may have. With this in mind we have decided to upgrade our Get Satisfaction account to allow users quick access toask questions, address issues, send us ideas, or simply comment on RSS Graffiti directly on Facebook. From this point forward you will be able to come to the RSS Graffiti home page and on the left hand side, click the Support tab to submit your inquiries directly. We hope this will make it easier for all of you as well as create a unified place for all of our users to get in touch with us.

Thanks!

Chris

Alright! We sailed and we failed...

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 01:10:33 +0200

That was an ugly one guys and it’s hard to apologize properly for it.

Here is what happened. Me and Dimitris moved to Luxembourg a couple of weeks ago. So yesterday, looking around through our database servers and debating new features, Dimitris noticed that there was an administrative account that was tied to my IP address in Sweden and said “We moved, didn’t we? I think we should now delete this one!” and I said “Yes please!”. So he deletes it.

Hours later we start seeing 1-star reviews on our Facebook Page. Five of them one after the other. I got worried but everything seemed to work fine so I thought it was just a bad coincidence and went to bed.

It turned out the next day, that not everything was working fine. Users were complaining that they could not add feeds on their pages. We tried but we could not reproduce the problem. All seemed fine. Later we realized that it was only newly added pages that had the issue. We created a new one and tested again. Voila! There was a problem. Big one! No new page had successfully been added to RSS Graffiti since yesterday!

Alright. We figured it out quickly and solved it. It was that user account we deleted. It turned out it was being used by a database trigger. Anyway. Let’s not get too technical here.

The point is we can’t apologize to all these users because we don’t even know who they are. Alright, I know, it’s not such a big deal; it’s only the new pages added for just one day that faced the issue. Ok. Still, it’s a stupid thing to do.

So please accept our apologies everyone. We only want to get better and it seems you can only get better by making mistakes right? As long as you don’t repeat the same mistakes all the time! So, we promise to stay put to Luxembourg for a few years. Alright?

Granting publish permissions to a Page causes "an unknown error occurred"

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 23:42:00 +0200

For those of you who get the “error an unknown error occurred” when trying to Grant permissions to your Fan Page, please perform the following steps.

1.) Go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/manage

2.) Find your Page that you want to add RSS Graffiti on and click Edit Page

3.) Go to the top Left Link (“Your Settings”)

4.) Check the first box: Posting Preferences: Always comment and post on your page as YOUR PAGE NAME even when using Facebook as YOUR OWN NAME.

5.) Click Save

6.) Go again to http://apps.facebook.com/rssgraffiti , click on your Page and try to provide the required permissions.

This should this time work Let us know if that helps
Dimitris for RSSGraffiti

Difficulties editing Fan Page / Group / Event / Application settings

Sun, 03 Apr 2011 16:17:00 +0200

PROBLEM

On my RSS Graffiti management page I click on the page that I want to update but when it refreshes the page I am back to the landing for the management page where I can add a feed for my personal profile. How can I edit my Fan Page /Group / Application settings?

FIX(temp)

This is a Facebook bug we are looing into. Till either Facebook Fixes that, or we implement a seemless workaround, use the following simpe trick:

1.) Click on the link to edit your Fan Page settings in RSSGraffiti.

2.) When the page reloads (not showing your Page/Group settings as expected but your Profile settings instead) simply press your Browser’s refresh button, or the F5 button in your keyboard. That should bring you to the correct destination.

Let us know if that helps

Fan Pages using new layout and Compact Style stories problem fixed.

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 01:44:34 +0100

Over the last weeks, after Facebook rolled out the new Page layout to all Fan Pages, we received your feedback, that the “Compact Style” posts did not get published correctly. The preview showed the format as previously, but the actual published post was only containing a single message, without any additional properties or the Share action link, just like Status Updates.

We managed to determine what is causing this behavior - actually what seems to be a Facebook bug - as well as a way to go around the issue and fix it.

What happens is that Facebook, when we are publishing to a New Page, treats posts slightly different than before. If there is no attachment description, (see here for the anatomy of a Facebook post) it discards all other information and simply posts a status update using the provided “message”.

What we implemented as a fix, is to send the publication date as the description instead of as just another Key-Value pair property of the attachment.

What this means for you and your feeds? The only noticeable difference will be that Published: {Date_Here} will appear first instead of last in your extended story info.

Before:

Read: Full story

Source: Source Name!

Published: 2011-03-14 22:33:53 GMT

After:

Published: 2011-03-14 22:33:53 GMT

Read: Full story

Source: Source Name!

When you preview your feed you will be able to see the exact way that the stories will appear on your wall as always.

So now you can use the Compact Style again in your new layout decorated Fan Pages. Thank you all for your valuable feedback!

Update on Short URLs issue

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 22:11:00 +0100

The issue that has been reported earlier today, causing posts to fail if they contained attachments with shortened or redirected URLs, is indeed a Facebook bug that affects every application that uses this feature.

In response to this issue we just deployed a workaround on our servers that will allow your posts to go through until Facebook fixes the issue. Now RSS Graffiti instead of shortening URLs it actually tries to expand (un-shorten) them. This effectively bypasses the Facebook issue.

At the moment of writing this, Facebook is also rolling-out a fix. We will keep our workaround in place until the fix by Facebook is confirmed.

For details on the bug see Bug 14832 on Facebook’s bug tracker.

Temporarily disabling URL shortening with Bit.ly

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 13:30:00 +0100

[UPDATE] This is a confirmed Facebook bug. We deployed a new work around. Read details here.

Many posts with attachments have been failing for the past several hours with the message:

Facebook responded with error 100: ‘attachment-href URL is not properly formatted’.

It turns out that Facebook is rejecting URLs shortened with bit.ly. This has happened also in the past, but Facebook had fixed the issue promptly. Our guess is that they will fix it again soon.

Nevertheless, as a temporary workaround, to unblock your posts from going through, we decided to bypass URL shortening with bit.ly.

We will keep monitoring the situation and keep you updated. We will re-enable bit.ly support after Facebook resolves this issue.

Temporarily disabling UI for Event Walls

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 03:10:40 +0100

Recently some users complained of getting a blank page while trying to access RSS Graffiti. With the help of one of our users we have been finally able to reproduce the problem and track down the cause.

I’ll get more technical about it later. Let me give you the bottom line first:

To solve this we have to disable the listing of your events on the left-hand column of RSS Graffiti.

What does this mean?

This means that you will not be able to see a list of your Facebook Events in the user interface and thus will not be able to click on any of them to add or edit your feeds for them.

Workaround

We will work on a workaround for this tomorrow and push it as soon as we can. In the mean time if you have added feeds on an Event and need to modify them please contact us at support@rssgraffiti.com, or leave a message on our Facebook Wall (http://facebook.com/rss.graffiti), or in our user support community (http://getsatisfaction.com/rssgraffiti) and we will help you make the modifications you need to do.

Is publishing on Event Wall affected?

No, publishing will continue normally for the feeds that you have already setup for your Facebook Events. This issue affects only the user interface.

How long will this go on?

Disabling the listing of Events in the UI is a temporary measure to allow the users that were blocked by this issue to use RSS Graffiti normally. Luckily the number of Event Walls that use RSS Graffiti is relatively small and hopefully those users will not be affected but this measure before we come up with an alternative solution. We hope to be able to find an alternative solution to the problem tomorrow.

So what was the problem?

The problem is that a Facebook FQL query which should list the Events created by a user, suddenly times out for some users. Although our implementation should work normally, there is some unknown problem in Facebook that causes it to time-out so badly that you don’t even see the Facebook logo appearing when this happens. We will file a bug to Facebook for this and look for alternative ways to implement the specific functionality ASAP.

Special thanks to the users that worked with us to track this down. We’ll keep you updated on how we tackle this issue.