Sharing to Facebook gets an update

We've made some much-needed updates to sharing your reviews, book adds, and other LibraryThing activity on Facebook.

Try it out by going to Your Feed—click "Share this" next to the action you'd like to share. (You can also get to Your Feed by clicking the "Share" link in the upper-right corner of any page on LibraryThing.)

Full details on the blog.

Here's what a shared review post looks like on Facebook today:



After Facebook retired their old publishing actions API, our direct sharing to Facebook feature was dead in the water, and had to be rebuilt from the ground up. This is why some of you might remember our having temporarily disabled this feature for a couple months. Major kudos are due to developer Chris C. for all his hard work on this!

Test it out, and let us know what you think.

I know the devs don't read Talk anymore, but even though I don't use this feature myself I'd like to pass along my thanks for all their hard work, and for dealing with being blamed for a change completely beyond their control.

>2 lorax: Thank you! I'll be sure to pass along your note. It was pretty rough going, and there was minimal notice about the change.

How is this supposed to work? I have made sure to reconnect my account to Facebook, but when I click "Share this" I just get an almost empty dialog box with two buttons, "Post to Facebook" and "Cancel" and nothing happens when I click "Post to Facebook".

I see on the blog that linking with FB isn't even required so I unlinked them again. It doesn't work regardless. Firefox 63.0.1 on MacOS 10.14.1.

ETA: Hmm, it uses popup windows?

ETA2: No, allowing popups makes no difference. Same on Safari 12.0.1. by the way.

>5 anglemark: Thanks for reporting, and I'm sorry for the trouble! You should click the "Post to Facebook" button in that dialog box. That should open a pop-up from Facebook. If you're not logged in, it'll prompt you to do so. If you are, you should see something like this:

https://image.librarything.com/pics/fb_update_cut.jpg

From there, you can edit as you like, then click "Post to Facebook" once more.

If that doesn't do the trick, can you post (or email me—loranne@librarything.com) some screenshots of what you're seeing?

It's simple, I see nothing. Nothing happens when I click the "Post to Facebook" button in that dialog box. But I'm sure it's some setting in my browser if it works for you and everyone else. I'll keep experimenting on Sunday when I have more time.

>7 anglemark: Sounds like a plan. Since you've got Firefox, I'd recommend trying Private Browsing mode, in case it's a plug-in.

Tested the same setup you mentioned in >5 anglemark: (FF 63 on Mac) on Browserstack, and it seems to be working fine from my end. Sorry for the trouble. Do let us know what you find!

No difference in Private Mode. Tweeting works, but not Facebook. I think I'm giving up. I'll manage without telling friends on Facebook what I'm doing on LibraryThing.

Would having the Facebook Container in Firefox affect this? I've just tried (Win 8.1, Firefox 63.0.3 {64 bit version}) and I can't get it to do anything either.



This is all I see. Click on the button and it does nothing.

I hate Facebook ;-(

>10 gilroy: That's exactly what it looks like for me as well.

I use Opera and clicking on the button "Post to Facebook" works; but then I cannot close the popup window. Clicking on "close" does not work.

In the interim version there was another button with a X on the left of the popup, and it worked; but now the button disappeared.

>10 gilroy: I'm not sure what you mean by "Facebook Container". But, thanks for the info. I can confirm I've been able to reproduce this issue on certain versions of Firefox on Browserstack, primarily for Windows so far.

>5 anglemark: Mac Mojave (10.14)/FF 63 is working fine both on my machine and Browserstack. On Firefox, do you see the yellow "Firefox prevented this site from opening a pop-up window" banner at all?

Similarly, on Safari, you should see a notice in the URL bar indicating that a pop-up window was blocked. If I click on that notice, the pop-up window appears. Does that not work for you?

Another thought—are you attempting to share the same action in Your Feed each time? Have you tried starting from a book review page? Just trying to narrow down possibilities.

I'm testing more on Browserstack to see if I can narrow down the issue and will report to developers.

>14 lorannen: I'm at work, so no Mac OS update for now. I tried it from a review, and it worked. Then I went back to the Feed and tried it there once more, and now it worked there as well. Whether sharing a review triggered something or some code was changed since I last tried I don't know, but for me it works now on my Windows 7 PC, using Chrome.

>15 anglemark: That's good to hear! Let me know if the Mac is working when you can?

Update on my end, I got Windows 10/FF 63 to work. It's possible you may need to refresh your browser window after okay-ing pop-ups. I'm still not sure why it worked after not working initially, to be honest.

>1 lorannen: Thank you for this! The first time I tried from the "share" feed, it didn't do anything, so I went to edit my book itself and clicked the share-to-facebook there. I added my comments and then posted, and it didn't post my review, only a link to the book itself here on LT.

The second one I clicked on from the "share" feed, it took a bit of a wait, but then the box popped up, with my review in it and I was able to share to Facebook, with some of my comments as well.

>17 MrsLee: Yes, there is something like a five-second delay before the second box pops up.

>16 lorannen: Now it works on my Mac as well and I can promise you I have not changed anything. I suspect one of the developers has changed something in the code. Nevermind, it works, I'm happy.

>19 anglemark: I suspect you're right, but it's good to hear, nonetheless. Thanks for the update!

Can we somehow add our facebook page instead our Facebook wall?

I believe we'd need to incorporate a different integration to enable sharing to an actual Facebook Page, but even if this were considered I'm not sure it would get accomplished anytime soon. There's a lot of other things that are higher priority at the moment, I'm very sorry for the inconvenience.