Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love

HTTPS URLs for Page tabs

We recently introduced the ability for users to browse Facebook over HTTPS. At the same time, we began providing a “Secure Canvas URL” field in the Developer App for developers to serve their apps through an HTTPS connection as well. Now that we added support for iframe Page tabs, we also have added a “Secure Tab URL” field. Please take some time to add a “Secure Tab URL” as if you have not, we will not be able to show your tab to users browsing Facebook over HTTPS.

Requests 2.0 notifications take users directly to your app

Since introducing Requests 2.0 last month, we’ve continued making several improvements. Most notably, now when a user clicks on a notification about a request sent from your app, they will be taken directly to your canvas page. Formerly they would be taken to the Games or Apps dashboard to act on the request. We hope removing this friction creates a better experience for your users. As such, you should remember to show the user all their outstanding requests in your app and clear requests that have been acted on.

Removing Year and Status from Affiliations

In thirty-one days on April 18th, we will be removing the year and status properties of the affiliations column in the “user” FQL table. This information is accessible in the education property of the User object in the Graph API or in the education_history column of the user FQL table. Since we had two places that could store the same data, it was possible to end up with conflicting data. As such, we’re removing these from the affiliations column since it was less up to date and had worse coverage. You can keep an eye on this and other upcoming changes on our roadmap.

Policy Checklist

We are excited to offer a Platform Policy checklist for use in reviewing your app’s features and functionality at the concept stage of development and just prior to launch. The checklist is available in multiple languages, and although it is not an exhaustive list of the Facebook Platform Policies, it provides a quick “sanity check” to help ensure your app does not contain any easily-avoidable policy violations.

Suppressing auto-generated feed stories when uploading photos

This week we added the requested ability to suppress the feed story that is automatically generated on a user’s profile when they upload a photo using your application. You may want to do this because you plan on publishing your own feed story about the activity and want to avoid the confusion of two stories being present. To do so, just add a no_story=1 parameter to the POST request you’re making. For more details, check out the photo object documentation.

HACK: Berlin

As we mentioned last week, we’ll be visiting Berlin, Paris, and London in the next couple weeks. This week we’ll email those who have RSVP-ed to the events to confirm your attendance. Our Paris and London events are full, but we were able to open up another fifty spots for HACK: Berlin so if you’ll be in Germany on March 25th we’d love to see you there. Please RSVP to the Facebook event as soon as possible if you’re interested in joining us.

Fixing Bugs

Bugzilla activity for the past 7 days:

• 197 new bugs were reported
• 47 bugs were reproducible and accepted (after duplicates removed)
• 26 bugs were fixed (21 previously reported bugs and 5 new bugs)
• As of today, there are 1,146 open bugs in Bugzilla (down 2,086 from last week)

Forum Activity

Developer Forum activity for the past 7 days:

• 595 New Topics Created
• 286 New Topics received a reply
• Of those 286, 46 were replied to by a Facebook Employee
• Of those 286, 53 were replied to by a community moderator