Mostly a Failure
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Publicize has been slowly failing, and is now defunct. When I started using Jetpack in August, everything worked fine. As I populated my small, local news site with articles and images, however, Jetpack got quirky.
The wrong pictures would be posted to Facebook. I would have an image of a football game on a field hockey article, for example. Sometimes no picture at all would be posted. Sometimes articles would post to Facebook, sometimes they wouldn’t. And it is SLOOOOWWWWWWWW.
I read through the forums and tried to learn about XML and Facebook codes and whatsits (I am not a programmer – hence my liberal use of WordPress and plugins). The forums are absolutely littered with reports of this problem and moderators/developers telling us they can’t see a problem, can’t reproduce a problem, or just not responding at all. I see Threads closed or marked resolved that most certainly were not; more like someone got frustrated with the complaints and just shut down the discussion.
I double checked image sizes. I made sure publicize was checked. I disabled, uninstalled and reinstalled plugins. I disconnected and reconnected FB and Twitter. Nothing worked.
Anyway, I DID get Jetpack Publicize working correctly and reliably for like a month after some miscellaneous updates (I’ll never know which update did it, but whatever). Then problems started again occasionally. Then more occasionally. Then nearly always.
After publicize attached a picture of a Disney character to an obituary, I finally shut off publicize and manually get up every morning and manually cross post my day’s articles to Facebook. Today, that stopped working. NO image. I can get text, but this is a news site and I rely on visual.
I go to the next article and it DOES pull an image; the featured image from the previous article that Jetpack couldn’t seem to find when I was actually trying to publicize that article. Brilliant.
So here is a summary – 1) Jetpack Publicize works unreliably, if at all.
2) Apparently the Jetpack developers feel Facebook and their magic code is to blame. Maybe it is, but not the point.
3) Threads here go back 2+ years with the same complaints from users, same excuses from developers, many, many updates and versions of WP and JP, and no solutions.
4) Jetpack’s components can be replaced by more reliable and better feature plugins in a few minutes.Let’s just get one thing straight – Jetpack Publicize (and sharing for that matter) boasts about its functionality that isn’t. Facebook is the top 1 or 2 most visited web site on Earth. Facebook has no obligation to your middling plugin. If you want to play the game, you play using the Facebook rules until someone else comes along. Then you play by whatever rules the new behemoth establishes. That’s how it works.
You don’t write a program that doesn’t work with your host application(s)then claim the hosts need to fix their core. Uh-uh.
If you can’t make your program work with WordPress and Facebook – consistently and reliably – then your product is an abject failure, is it not?
I understand it’s free, and I appreciate that. But it is also useless. The results can be downright unacceptably embarrassing to my site. I can’t use it. Many, many others can’t use it. You can make excuses about FB updates all day. Maybe there is no way to write a plugin that will publicize to FB properly. I can live with that. But don’t sell me a bill of goods claiming you can if you can’t.
Fix Publicize or eliminate Publicize. Period. No more excuses. No more sending virtual newbies on wild goose chases through CSS, PHP, HTML and XML. Enough already.
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