Publicize ignoring Custom Text on Facebook

Thanks. I’ll probably be turning it off on another site as well since, for some reason, it’s now adding black bars to the top and bottom of my photos.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152843952710737&set=a.10151981331850737.1073741827.713745736&type=1 (this isn’t so bad since the photo is black and white, but for others it would change the feel of the photo to me.)

https://www.miriland.com/2015/05/22/wicked/

We add black borders when the photo would otherwise not conform to Facebook’s size requirements and would be rejected.

It’s the exact same image size as other photos that have cross-posted without the bars before yesterday.

https://www.miriland.com/2015/05/22/wicked/
https://www.miriland.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/IMG_7693.jpg – 1500×1000

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152843952710737&set=a.10151981331850737.1073741827.713745736&type=1 – bars

https://www.miriland.com/2015/05/21/barbed/
https://www.miriland.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/IMG_7692.jpg – 1500×1000

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152841379350737&set=a.10151981331850737.1073741827.713745736&type=1&permPage=1 – no bars

mitchellalerts and miri have pretty much summed up my conerns, so there’s little need to repeat.

I just find it quite annoying that such a major cosmetic change was rolled out quietly without (seemingly) any consultation. The “Title, link and picture” format is just perfect for my site and I’d like to keep it that way – especially as the new version seems to be preferring the embedded image in my document instead of the larger, more eye-catching title image.

Putting it simply, this new facebook post layout *doesn’t look as good*. It’s as simple as that. Please roll back to the original, or at the very least offer it as an option and tell us how to restore it.

To save me digging through the countless social media plug-ins – does anyone know of one which will do what Publicize did up until the other day? If we’re not going to get the old layout back, I’d rather switch… and there seems to be rather a lot to choose from!

I’ve pushed out a change on the server side (no update to Jetpack required).

For Facebook posts, we now send the custom message (along with the URL) without the excerpt, if a custom message is set. We still send an excerpt if no custom message is set.

I hope that this is more in line with what you’re expecting. We are still planning to add the customization/template feature as suggested earlier, but that will require additional development time, and I don’t have an ETA for that right now.

@miri, thanks for reporting the bug with the black bars around images that are not too small. I’ve filed the bug report and we’ll investigate it further.

@lainPurdie: Hi and thanks for the additional feedback ??

The main changes that were deployed yesterday were non-visual, behind-the-scenes technical performance and reliability improvements. As part of that we did improve some of the visuals, but they were mostly minor changes. As with most changes, there will be minor quirks that need to be worked out. That’s what were doing now.

As you can see we just fixed the main annoyance here with regards to the custom message.

If you have any further pain points with Publicize, please let us know. We’re here to help and want to improve the service.

Best

@joey – just sent a test post and it’s still publishing the in-line image from my post instead of the featured image, which we’ve always had in the past and much prefer. It stands out so much more.

And P.S. sorry to moan. I know this is all a service pretty much provided for free and I do appreciate the huge scale of the JetPack project. It’s just annoying for a user when something they’re used to and like gets changed without any warning for something that’s not as useful ??

For ref:

Old style: https://www.facebook.com/MoshvilleTimes/posts/1114828965200441

New style: https://www.facebook.com/MoshvilleTimes/posts/1116153928401278

@jkudish – thanks for the updates. I’ll give it a try with my next post.

@iainpurdie – I’ve had the same problem with Facebook forever. It seems to randomly pick images from the post instead of the featured one. If you go to the post and click on the little arrow in the upper right, you can click on “Refresh share attachment” and that often brings up the featured image.

Oh. I guess I won’t give the updates a try. I had disconnected Facebook from publicize. Now, when I try to reconnect, I get this error message:

Something which should never happen, happened. Sorry about that. If you try again, maybe it will work.

Error code: -32300

@miri – I’ve had it on and off as well, but it’s been fine for the last few months. Seems consistent since the change was made to Publicize the other day, though. Perhaps that’s coincidence.

I’ve not got a “Refresh share attachment” option in the drop-down, but facebook never seems very consistent over what options/functions it gives to different people!

Thanks for the additional details @lainPurdie. You helped me identify a bug that only affected some Jetpack sites. I’ve implemented a fix for it. Future posts should include the larger featured image you are used to.

@joey: Aaaaaand… fixed! Back the way it was before! *Phew* Thank you!