 December
2011 - After spending an unreasonable amount of time
searching for a solution to recent Facebook comments plugin
problems, I decided to post this page in hopes someone can
come up with some answers.
As many of you website owners already know, Facebook made
changes to their comments plugin recently. The old comments
plugin now displays the following message in the commenting
window.
“Warning: this comments
plugin is operating in compatibility mode, but has no posts
yet. Consider specifying an explicit 'href' as suggested in
the comments plugin documentation to take advantage of all
plugin features.”
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This message appears to be showing up only on pages without
any posts. In any event the number of posts to my sites, and
no doubt to other sites across the Internet are down
dramatically.
It seems the consensus online consists of the following
solutions, none of which are acceptable.
1. Continue using the old comments
plugin - this sucks since it means site visitors will
continue to see the message shown above and be reluctant to
post.
2. Begin using the new comments
plugin - this really sucks since it completely wipes
out all previous posts!!!! Pretty unfair to those kind folks
who took the time to login to their Facebook accounts and
comment. Sucks for site owners too whose reputations are
built on the accolades of others.
Note: was unable to
get the comments moderation to work with the new version
Additional Note: the
old plugin could be added to a master template and when
updating site pages the plugin would be installed on each
page with the result being individual site pages could
receive posts independent of other site pages. Installing
the new plugin results in a sitewide comments plugin with
the only way to individually comment on each page is to
manually install the plugin on each page with the page URL
specified in the script.
3. Discontinue using all Facebook
comments plugins - this really really really sucks
since, as we all know, a tremendous amount of site traffic
can be derived from implementing any of the many Facebook
plugins which take full advantage of the guestimated 800
million active members.
Facebook seems unwilling to address these issues making me
think this is their way of forcing site owners to comply and
install the new plugin. Numerous blogs in and out of
Facebook are addressing this issue with representatives from
Facebook nowhere to be found.
Stackoverflow blog - recent post about the problem
Stackoverflow blog - another recent post about the problem
Wordpress blog - recent post about the problem
Paul O'Flaherty - recent post about the problem
In addition I posted a comment about this problem on the
following page for the comment plugin and the comment
automatically deleted when the page was refreshed.
Facebook comments plugin page
If anyone out there knows of a solution to this problem,
preferably a way to use the new plugin and:
1. easily install it sitewide with
individual commenting on each page
2. retain all comments posted using the previous plugin
3. find a way to moderate the comments
please post a solution below using,
ironically, the
Facebook comments plugin. |
