Sharing on Facebook/Twitter

  • Resolved martingrandjean

    (@martingrandjean)


    8 years, 3 months ago

    Hi!
    Something strange that could probably easily be corrected is the sharing behaviour of the pages created with PressForward: when you share the link on Twitter, everything goes normally, it shares a link to the post you just made, but when you share it on Facebook, it shares a direct link to the source, not to the curated post.
    That’s the case on DHNow, but also on many other websites using PressForward. And the consequence is that when you create a PressForward post in a theme including sharing buttons with counts, the Facebook button will automatically be incremented with the shares of the primary source.
    Fundamentaly, PressForward Dev may lead a discussion on the necessity to always refer to and share the primary source AND/OR the curated post. But for now, it’s important that all the buttons have the same effect: sharing the primary source OR sharing the PressForward post.
    Is there a way to modify the plugin to force the sharing of the post or the primary source on every social media?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Hi, @martingrandjean,

    This is a great catch; thanks for bringing it to our attention! Let me pass this around the team and see if we have an ideas.

    Thanks again,

    E

    Thread Starter martingrandjean

    (@martingrandjean)

    Thank you Eric, I will be delighted to know the result of your reflections!

    Plugin Author Aram Zucker-Scharff

    (@aramzs)

    Hi @martingrandjean,

    This has to do with PressForward setting and Facebook’s methodology of handling opengraph data.

    In order to assure compliance with various search engines PressForward automatically designates the source URL in the HEAD. Individuals can unhook those actions in their own sites and configurations, but that is the default configuration, on the assumption that PressForward posts are heavily duplicative of existing content.

    When we supply these links, different platforms may choose to do different things with them. Twitter may choose not to crawl this information and therefore the link appears as if to the DHNow site.

    Facebook, however, crawls these links and pulls data from the original (canonical, or og:url in the meta) source page. This is why it appears as if when you post a link it is linking to the original page. Unless that page implements Facebook Instant Articles, it doesn’t actually link to the source page, it only looks like it, the user still passes through the DHNow site as is normal. Facebook (rightly, I think) understands that PressForward is essentially supplying a forwarding link (similar to a service like bit.ly). You’ll find that other social platforms have the same exact behavior. In this case, it is Twitter that is somewhat abnormal compared to its peers.

    Does this make sense?

    Plugin Author Aram Zucker-Scharff

    (@aramzs)

    For reference, if you want to remove this behavior on your own site, you’ll have to unhook the function that maintains it on basic WP installs and by hooking to a number of popular plugins. You can do this by adding the following lines to your theme’s functions.php file:

    remove_filter('wpseo_canonical', 'pf_filter_canonical');
remove_filter('wpseo_opengraph_url', 'pf_filter_canonical');
remove_action ('wp_head', 'pf_forward_unto_source');

    Note that, intentionally, this also removes the auto-forwarding mechanic.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • The topic ‘Sharing on Facebook/Twitter’ is closed to new replies.