Shares not working again

Hello Mike,

I’m a fan but it’s so frustrating when shares don’t show and I’ve no idea why

Are you referring to the share counts that appear on the sharing button? I can see those for all posts on your site.

Those share counts don’t technically have anything to do with Jetpack. The Facebook sharing button uses Facebook’s own code. Jetpack just gives you a way to add that code to your site without actually touching the code itself.

The share count that displays comes directly from Facebook via their API, so if share counts are not displaying, the most likely cause is that the browser on which you’re viewing the posts are unable to fetch that information from Facebook at that particular time.

I then realised it was Firefox (which has happened before). Does Jetpack communicate with the main browsers?

This is not a Firefox issue – I’m using Firefox and can see share counts on all your posts. It’s a connection issue between the specific browser on a specific computer, and Facebook’s API.

It could be as simple as a file stuck in the browser cache, so as a first step, check if clearing the browser cache makes any difference. Your computer or router’s DNS cache is another possibility, but less likely if the issue only happens in one browser. But it’s worth trying to clear those as well if clearing the browser cache alone doesn’t work.

Let me know haw that goes.

What communication is there between Jetpack and, for example, Facebook when it goes down. And where can we view that so as to know whether to count or discount it as a factor. When there is that problem, it would be useful to see the error message in the dashboard. Knowing there’s a problem lessens frustration because it will be fixed.

There’s no communication of the type I think you’re referring to. Facebook doesn’t notify us if there’s a problem with their API. We usually find out about major outages when we see an influx of support requests about a particular issue, and then we address it. But we’re just one of thousands of services using Facebook’s API, and they don’t, as a rule, notify each service if there’s a problem.

And there’s no way for us to know if a local browser is unable to fetch data over Facebook’s API, as I suspect is the case here as we don’t monitor every network call your browser makes when you load your site.

FYI, if Firefox’s content/tracker blocking is enabled, then the Facebook counts will not appear on the button as Firefox doesn’t load the scripts and such to get them. So, make sure you don’t have blocking enabled for your own site. It also causes Twitter and Facebook widgets to not appear/work as well.

You gentlemen were very helpful. Thank you. It was in fact Adblock Plus. Although it wasn’t set to stop social media tracking, it was doing so. I assume something went wrong when it and Firefox Nightly automatically updated on restart yesterday. However, whitelisting my sites solved that. Thanks again!

A tracking blocker can definitely do this, yes. Nice catch, @markrh!