IainPurdie

I was about to report the same error. A shame that it’s not likely to be repaired any time soon – thanks for a great plug-in that has been useful!

WordPress 4.5 has, for our site, been a pain. I wish we’d tested it before upgrading ??

Thanks for that first hint. I think I’d spotted that some time ago, but forgotten about it.

As for the external tab issue, I’m not going to get into an argument but I’d dispute “most” people doing it unless it’s the default on browsers as “most” people don’t tend to mess with settings. Only nerds like you and I ??

It still doesn’t get round the problem that we, as a site, prefer to open external links in a new tab. Why have multiple-tab-capable browsers if you don’t use the facility? I guess there’s arguments either way, but that’s a discussion for another time!

As it stands, though, we now have to manually edit each link where we didn’t before. I did find that you can do it keyboard-only using the TAB key to hop to the cog, but it’s still a pain the posterior compared to the previous version.

Generally, I just don’t see any advantage in this new interface. So we get a smaller popup… it doesn’t increase the speed of editing by any discernable amount, just increases the inconvenience if you *do* want to use the larger popup window. As such, why not just leave it as it was?

“Facebook posts including more content (like an excerpt) are more likely to attract the eyes of your Facebook fans.”

But, as has been pointed out elsewhere, often results in fewer click-throughs as people read the bumph that’s been pushed onto facebook instead of clicking the link and going to the host website.

So, essentially, Publicize has been broken and we’re now stuck waiting for you to fix it when a reversal is possible (and had already been temporarily undertaken). It’s also up to us to keep an eye on the development process to attempt to spot when a fix is in place as we’ve stopped using the plug-in in the interim.

Way to go *slow handclap*

I get the last one, but I don’t put in a custom message. I never have. Default behaviour, up until a few days ago, was for a post with no custom message to display the post title and link (similar to https://i.wpne.ws/bCho). Now, doing the exact same thing results in something like https://i.wpne.ws/bBRY – the default behaviour has changed, and I am now required to make a manual entry into another box, just to get the same results I got with less work previously.

In addition, as someone else has pointed out, the mobile app has *nowhere for you to make such a change* so posting from there results in the messy posts with a huge amount of post text added to the facebook version. Even if there was a space to do this, why should more input (especially on a mobile device with their awkward keyboards) be required to get facebook posts laid out the way they used to?

If I don’t enter additional text, I shouldn’t expect Publicize to add a ton of it for me.

Actually, if I click on “Edit Details” then Publicize – by default – populates it with the post title… which is all I want to appear on facebook (as per https://i.wpne.ws/bCho). However, I never used to have to click on “Edit Details” to get it to do this. Why do I have to do this now? It’s an additional step. If I forget, then I have to go into facebook and edit the post to clear up the mess Publicize has made by shoving a bunch of text onto the front of the post – behaviour that was not default until the change was rolled out server-side without telling anyone.

All I am asking is for Publicize to go back to how it worked a week ago. Joey did this for a wonderful, relieving hour… and then someone undid it and we’re back to the current mess.

In the meantime, I’m having to resort to another product to do my FB posts which involves an extra screen popping up and therefore takes longer to get the posts online, plus it exposes posting rights to my personal FB page to all of the editors who work on my site… but it prevents us having to repair broken FB posts if someone forgets to click an extra box *on every single post*.

Publicize wasn’t broken. Why did you “fix” it?

@ryan – quoting Joey (other plugin author) from a few days ago: “This is part of a set of intentional changes we released for Publicize yesterday. The changes are server-side so not as part of Jetpack update. Re-connecting your connections will not have any effect.”

So is the issue down to the plug-in connection or not? For a brief moment – after Joey made a change – it all started to work again. Then, within an hour or so it was re-broken. I can only assume that whatever Joey rolled back, someone else re-implemented.

I’m now using Social for facebook publicity and Socialize for Twitter?/G+ (Social doesn’t handle G+ hence using two plug-ins). I’d *much* rather use Socialize as it handles multiple facebook pages more securely than Social, but not while it throws 2-300 words of my posts up on the facebook page, ignoring the custom text. All I want is title and link.

@aleaandbilly Thanks for that. Most annoyed that the error was fixed for a couple of hours and is now back to “broken”. Absolute pain in the nethers having to post, then go to facebook to edit the post and change it to what it should be.

On the point of ditching Jetpack and just copy/pasting the link manually instead. Absolute farce.

Argh.

Just posted a new item on the blog and it’s appeared on WordPress complete with the 3/4 of the article and “[120 more words]”… Back to where we were yesterday ??

Joey: *bookmarked* Nothing like making it easy. And facebook really don’t like making it easy…

@miri Well what do you know? Learn something new every day. Although facebook’s inconsistent user experience isn’t exactly news ??

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

@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!

For ref:

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

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

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 ??

@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.

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!