[Plugin: Simple Facebook Connect] Facebook rule on fan page comment upload from wordpress

However it seems that to put the user comments entered into wordpress into my facebook fanpage would violate a facebook term/condition.

No, it’s just not possible. Pulling comments back from Facebook can be done, posting comments to FB as somebody else isn’t within the realm of possibility. FB doesn’t have a way to do it.

The comments module does add a checkbox to “Share comment on Facebook” when somebody leaves a comment using the FB button. This will post their comment, and a link back to your post, onto their Wall.

OK.

How about posting the other persons comment from myself as a quote to my wall – hence achieving the desired affect – but in a muckier way?

E.g. my blog, my facebook, a friend (friend1) places comment into blog, comment goes to facebook as me containing text indicating quote from friend1?

Too messy perhaps?

Bought you another beer.

FYI, on https://ottopress.com/ their might be a z-index issue with the drop down menu in chrome. The like button etc appearing on top of the drop down menu.

A bit messy, yes. Also kinda spammy if you think about it. The point of posting things to a Fan Page is to broadcast to your Fans, really. Doesn’t make much sense to put comments on the blog up there. Maybe for a group thing. I’ll think about it.

The menu issue is known. It’s basically a problem with how the like button works. It’s in an iframe that’s connected to FB, and there’s no good solution for all browsers or cases.

Another beer donated.

Using WordPress for feedback for my charter fishing business. My intention is for followers of my business/fan page to be able to see all recent feedback (and not have to know that they need to go to the blog if they are a Facebook user). It is surprising how many people love reading anything at all about fishing. These comments are fresh content that will interest fan page readers as the comments are about the business and that is the reason they are on the fan page.

Feel free to mark as resolved – or estimate how many beers I might be able to bribe you with to add this feature as definitely useful for my scenario – and I suspect others.

By the way, fantastic support and fantastic plugin – but I am sure you have been told that a few thousand times.

Cheers

Heh. Honestly, I get more “you’re a mean hateful person who sucks” comments. Must be my pleasant demeanor. ??

The “Share Comment on Facebook” thing could probably be modified to allow users to post their comments to the FB page. I’ll think about it. However, according to FB’s terms and conditions, this has to be opt-in, in all cases. Meaning that the user leaving the comment has to somehow explicitly choose to cross-post it to Facebook; it can’t happen automatically. For the comments, I make that checkbox off by default. Other ways to do it could be a popup dialog on submit, or something to that effect.

If you decide to do something and require beer to get thru it let me know at admin at newzealandfishing dott comm – it would be worth a few dozen to me!

My vote would be checkbox (like you already have it for sharing comments to facebook) as opposed to popup – personally I find popups irritating. Perhaps an additional checkbox next to the existing one for sharing comments?

Have donated to your beer fund again.

Feel free to close this if you like.

Cheers

Hi Otto and Andrew,

I think I am trying to do something similar, so wanted to post to this thread to see if we were interested in the same thing and see if I wanted to do was possible.

Right now, We have a WordPress site where users can create a post. I want that post to automatically be added to my FB page. That much is very straight forward.

Then, we want to sync the comments between the two. So if someone logs in to WordPress (using FB connect) and posts a comment on the WordPress post, it shows as part of the comments below that posting on the FB page wall.

If someone posts a comment on that specific post via the FB page, it should also show up in the WordPress comments.

In both cases, the comments should be attributed (and linked) to the FB user that created the comment.

I just wanted to confirm, is this not allowed by FB? If it is allowed, is it possible to configure your plugin to do so? I’d definitely be interested in sponsoring that part of development if so.

Thank you!
Jason

Hi Jason

Part of what you are wanting is already taken care of by Simple Facebook Connect i.e. comments do get pulled back from facebook to wordpress, its going the other that is the shortfall, i.e. from wordpress to facebook – your own comments will but not others.

Otto will correct me if I got the wrong end of the stick but it seems facebook provides apis effectively enabling wordpress posts and comments of the facebook authorized user to go to their own facebook page but not someone else’s even if that means your page and it is your blog. If I am logged into facebook and commenting on your blog then facebook allows that to go to my facebook but not yours. Logically I don’t understand why, maybe there is technical reason, or maybe it will be added in the future (I havn’t strained the brain too much trying to think of reasons why – just accepted the shortcoming).

The best way I could see around this was to send quoted comments. I don’t see a legal problem with you adding a comment into your facebook and stating that it is a quote and who and where it is from i.e. “Joe Bloggs, https://yourblogpost”. Since SFC can already send your comments then this is definitely possible but might look a bit messy and the gravatar would be your own.

I too would be interested in funding Otto to do this – he did say he would think about it and I guess if he gets enough requests then it might happen. The messiness of the comments in facebook would be Ottos issue – however if it were an option that was under settings then some like myself and yourself would choose to accept the messiness anyway as the best compromise.

Otto did mention that it might need authority from the user entering the comment, however I thought about that and since it would be me quoting someone else on my page, I think it would be me that would need to authorize and hence turning the switch on under the sfc settings should suffice.

So if someone logs in to WordPress (using FB connect) and posts a comment on the WordPress post, it shows as part of the comments below that posting on the FB page wall.

That part simply can’t be done. Facebook just doesn’t work that way.

Jason

There was originally another plugin that I had tried before finding otto’s simple facebook connect. I just couldn’t get past the facebook set up side of it and it seemed like it perhaps wasn’t up to date – but really I just couldn’t seem to find good instructions on the facebook side – or else facebook might have been having issue or something – though doubtful.

It involved creating a facebook canvas app which would effectively embed the contents i.e. posts and comments of your blog direct within facebook and you would direct your follows at the canvas page rather than your wall. I am assuming it would still use peoples gravatars etc. This would have achieved your wishes but I just kept getting 404 errors trying to access the canvas page.

I suspect there would likely be other drawbacks limitations with that method though I couldn’t state any without investigating.

Hey Andrew,

Agreed – it seems odd. They can comment directly on a post on the FB page, but can’t post from WordPress, even though they’re logged in via FB connect.

Otto,

Thanks so much for the info – if you think of a way around this, certainly let us know. It sounds like we’d be very interest, and I am sure others would as well.

-Jason

Otto, one last question and then I’ll stop pestering you.

Do you know if it would be possible to set this up if we used the embedded Facebook Social Comments (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comments/)?

Do those allow you to easily sync the two comments, even from a FB page?

Thank you again for all the help.
Jason

@yovanoff: To the best of my knowledge, no. The comments widget from FB lets you make a separate comments section for a URL, but it doesn’t let you show comments from an FB post anywhere.

Otto:

Thanks for amazing knowledge and wonderful tools.

Wanted to chime in with something slightly off the beaten path, that has us hemmed into a similar crunch as the OP’s need.

We have a site for a non-profit — a prayer ministry. The site is powered by WP, and it uses WP’s built-in comments features to let people post prayer needs. They are not commenting (“legally speaking”) on any actual article. They are seeking to publish prayer needs, and we (behind the scenes) use WP’s comments code to handle it. We do this by having an empty article called “Prayer Wall” and we some of WP’s language retooling method to change the displayed wording on buttons, etc, so it looks (to them) like they are “posting on a prayer wall” instead of “commenting on an article.”

In order to help these folks with publishing their prayer needs, it would be nice to have the posts (technically WP comments) appear on our Facebook “fan page wall” for the non-profit.

What “admin@nzfishing” said above (i.e. the “muckier” way) would work here for us. We just don’t know how to do it.