v2.0.7 didn't fix my FB problem, seems to have broken other things

Facebook recently stopped generating thumbnail images when I paste into it the URL of a blog article. It still generates the “Title” and “Description,” but no thumbnail image. The problem began with this, my most recent posting:

https://alanb.org/ImperfectFifths/everything-is-illuminated-5/

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When I paste in these links (from the three previous blog posts), FB automatically generates a thumbnail:

https://alanb.org/ImperfectFifths/mystery-tree/

https://alanb.org/ImperfectFifths/michael-lowenstern-bass-clarinet-and-other-wonderment-at-the-tribeca-new-music-festival-2013/

https://alanb.org/ImperfectFifths/the-living-earth-shows-terra-musicum-vivi-at-the-tribeca-new-music-festival-2013/

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I copied the entire code for the above “Mystery Tree” post, and pasted it into a brand new post, which I ‘published’ under a new article name. When I pasted the URL for this new article into Facebook, there was no thumbnail… even though its contents are 100% IDENTICAL to the previous post for which FB does generate a thumbnail.

This suggests that something has changed since May 29 (the date of my next-to-last posting) that now prevents FB from scraping the necessary image data to create a thumbnail.

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I tried removing/replacing my current WordPress theme, and the problem persists.

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I went to Facebook ‘s “Object debugger” [https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug] and entered the URLs for both the older “Mystery Tree” post (for which FB does generate a thumbnail) and the “Everything Is Illuminated” post (for which FB does not generate a thumbnail.

Looking first at the results for the older “Mystery Tree” post, which you can view here.

I see four “Open Graph Warnings That Should Be Fixed”:

Inferred Property The ‘og:url’ property should be explicitly provided, even if a value can be inferred from other tags.

Inferred Property The ‘og:title’ property should be explicitly provided, even if a value can be inferred from other tags.

Inferred Property The ‘og:description’ property should be explicitly provided, even if a value can be inferred from other tags.

Inferred Property The ‘og:image’ property should be explicitly provided, even if a value can be inferred from other tags.

Looking at the “Object Properties” section, you can see a small thumbnail next to “og:image”

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Looking next at the results for the “Everything Is Illuminated” post, which you can view here.

I see the same four “Open Graph Warnings That Should Be Fixed”… and I also see that there now NO IMAGE next to “og:image” in the “Object Properties” section. There clearly is an image in the blog post itself… something is preventing FB from seeing it…???

In an attempt to circumnavigate the above problem, I installed Facebook Open Graph protocol plugin v2.0.7.

Nothing changed — FB still worked fine with all older posts, but continued to generate “Title” and “Description” but no thumbnail image for both the “Everything Is Illuminated” post and ANY NEW POST.

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I even created this 200×200 pixel image, whose URL I included for the plug-in’s “Default Image URL to use” option.

FB never used that image… even when I checked the “Force Fallback Image as Default ” box.

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I went back to the FB debugging page, to see what was different now that I had installed the Facebook Open Graph protocol plugin.

Looking at the “Mystery Tree” page’s results, I see that the original four “Open Graph Warnings That Should Be Fixed” were no longer listed…

…however, in their place I see two NEW warnings:

Meta with name instead of property The meta tag on the page was specified with name ‘author’, which matches a configured property of this object type. It will be ignored unless specified with the meta property attribute instead of the meta name attribute.

og:image should be larger Provided og:image is not big enough. Please use an image that’s at least 200×200 px. Image ‘https://alanb.org/ImperfectFifths/__Images/Riverdale%20Tree%20with%20Straight-up%20Branches%20-%20Image%20132.jpg’ will be used instead.

That second one is bizarre, as the image in the post (which FB used to generate the thumbnail) is significantly larger than 200×200.

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Looking now at the “Everything Is Illuminated” page’s results, I see that the original four “Open Graph Warnings That Should Be Fixed” were no longer listed…

… and that it only lists one of the two new warnings found in the “Mystery Tree” results:

Meta with name instead of property The meta tag on the page was specified with name ‘author’, which matches a configured property of this object type. It will be ignored unless specified with the meta property attribute instead of the meta name attribute.

There was no “og:image should be larger” warning.

Looking at the “Raw Open Graph Document Information,” I see the following lines:

Meta Tag <meta property=”og:image” content=”https://alanb.org/ImperfectFifths/__Images/SVA-illuminated-Pyrus-calleryana.jpg&#8221; />

Meta Tag <meta property=”og:image” content=”https://alanb.org/ImperfectFifths/__Images/APLogo-200×200.jpg&#8221; />

So FB sees two images (one is the 200×200 “Default Image URL to use” and the other is the main, much larger, image)… yet there is no image listed in the “Object Properties” section under “og:image”

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What’s going on here?

Has anyone else started having similar problems?

What other information can I provide to better help you figure this out?

THANKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My webhost says:

Judging by the debug information you provided, it looks like this is most likely a coding issue–something in the code of your theme or WordPress install may be either defining image tags ambiguously, or it may be preventing Facebook’s scraping mechanism from grabbing the images.

(For what it’s worth the second seems unlikely to me, since there are no restrictive .htaccess directives or folder permissions that I saw which would prevent it, and you can directly access the picture itself without issue here: https://alanb.org/ImperfectFifths/__Images/SVA-illuminated-Pyrus-calleryana.jpg )

This isn’t an issue which is showing up for other websites on our servers, and Google+ for example is able to scrape images for its thumbnails without issue. It looks like this is specific to Facebook and your website. Your best option in this case would be to contact Facebook and/or a web developer to help you dig through your coding for the solution to this problem.

Lets first start with the debugger. It can’t even scrape the alanb.org/ImperfectFifths/everything-is-illuminated-5/
On refreshing that a few times it did scan and giving a warning on a meta tag you have up top doing this:
<meta name="author" content="Ars P" />
Warning is: Meta with name instead of property: The meta tag on the page was specified with name ‘author’, which matches a configured property of this object type. It will be ignored unless specified with the meta property attribute instead of the meta name attribute.

This isn’t bad, just a warning and it’s not from my plugin – seems you probably have that hardcoded in the theme.

If you look at source the plugin is generating stuff fine.

<!-- WordPress Facebook Open Graph protocol plugin (WPFBOGP v2.0.7) https://rynoweb.com/wordpress-plugins/ -->
<meta property="fb:admins" content="742428220"/>
<meta property="og:url" content="https://alanb.org/ImperfectFifths/everything-is-illuminated-5/"/>
<meta property="og:title" content="Everything Is Illuminated….."/>
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Imperfect Fifths"/>
<meta property="og:description" content="  Through each bout of vernal darkness, the arboreal, virginal white of this Pyrus calleryana (Callery pear) tree was set ablaze by the electrostatic emission"/>
<meta property="og:type" content="article"/>
<meta property="og:image" content="https://alanb.org/ImperfectFifths/__Images/SVA-illuminated-Pyrus-calleryana.jpg"/>
<meta property="og:image" content="https://alanb.org/ImperfectFifths/__Images/APLogo-200x200.jpg"/>
<meta property="og:locale" content="en_us"/>
<!-- // end wpfbogp -->

So looking at your blog root: https://alanb.org/ImperfectFifths/ there seems to be some redirect loops your host is serving so that’s on them… seems to be something with the trailing slash thing.

Also you should never have spaces in file names… always causes problems with everything.

this is just a lot to go through… been busy