Hi Mike, I was able to find the issue with my site. I have an extension called Redirect On Login installed (normally a very good extension) which was causing the facebook scraper to get redirected and I think it was crashing. As this seems like a common issue, here are some of the steps I took to solve the problem, in case others have this issue: 1. build a test html page with only html, body, and the open graph tags facebook suggests. This will help verify if your problem is a server setup issue, DNS, or similar. 2. you can create a virgin install of joomla and test that any of your htaccess or robots files aren't causing any issues. This also proves that, if this works, likely you have an extension causing an issue. 3. begin to strip out any extensions from your main page (I brought mine down to a hello world and not much else. 4. using your apache http log, you can see what sort of errors are being generated and how far the parser gets. For example, if you put an og:image tag into your file, you should be able to see the apache log retrieve the image. That's a rough summary of the steps I took to debug the problem. Hope this helps someone else in the future...
Another issue may be that my site must be logged in to be seen, it recommends facebook crawler. Is this something that I need to enable in order for parainvite to work?
I also want to quickly make the distinction: I am trying to allow parainvite to utilize the facebook api to allow users to login and obtain their contacts so they may send them invite messages. At this point in time, I am not trying to allow facebook to share groups or webpages (this may/will be the case in the future but not yet). The functionality I'm trying to use is the "Invite Friends" feature within facebook. It appears that facebook wants/requires the website to implement open graph tags in the meta data. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/best-practices While this may be best practice, is this required implementation to get the "Invite Friends" with the facebook api to work? Also, do you have any documentation showing how/why this is required?
Hi Mike, Thank you for the link to the tools and the issue. I see that facebook sees my site as returning a blank document, but please forgive my lack of familiarity with this issue. What is it that my site should be returning? The DNS records correctly point to my website as far as I can see. You had stated: "you root URL's (http://saintconnection.com/dev1) DNS is still resolving to an empty page I have A records for both www.saintconnection.com and saintconnection.com. These can be independently verified through a DNS lookup service. You stated: "Try sharing that URL manually on Facebook and you will see" How do I share this manually? What is automatically vs. manually? In the facebook developer setup for the application, is there another link that I should use instead of http://www.saintconnection.com/dev1/ ? Based on the information, I can't tell if this is a facebook issue (i.e. they are caching old information from a search they've done), facebook application setup issue (i.e. I have entered the wrong information to get the correct results), ParaInvite issue (i.e. there is a bug in the parainvite code which is passing facebook incorrect information), Parainvite setup issue (i.e. I have entered the wrong information to get the correct results inside of parainvite), Joomla setup issue (i.e. I have setup Joomla in a way or Joomla defaults in such a way that breaks facebook and parainvite's functionality), or webserver setup issue (i.e. I have a missing A, CNAME, AAAA, etc. entry in a DNS table somewhere that doesn't resolve some special case that facebook needs). Any help, ideas, direction you can provide would be much appreciated. Unfortunately, I am not a Open Graph Object expert (yet) and don't know how to debug the issue. I do know, that all of the other services other than facebook (and linkedin due to no business partner status) work great and as advertised. The documentation for parainvite on the facebook side is slightly outdated (the screens, procedure, etc. don't match because facebook seems to have changed).
Checking on the status of this. I've tried several permutations of the settings via facebook and there is a mismatch between the documentation provided in Parainvite and the facebook settings. Are subfolders not supported? Thanks in advance for your help.
Issue with Facebook Setup, API Error Code 100. Error Message 'link' is invalid
