[Monitoring] Duplicate Facebook Posts with an Undelivered Error - 10 February 2023 @ 14:00 GMT
[Update] 10 February 2023 @ 14:00 GMT
We have moved forward with updating Facebook posts that have been receiving the 'Looks like Facebook put a restriction on this app' error.
This means:
We have turned off our re-try logic in this case as we did for other posts affected by the outstanding bug on Facebook to ideally avoid the posts being duplicated and to also update the error message in this case to 'Facebook did not confirm this post was successfully published. Please check on the Facebook Page directly to confirm if it was posted and resend this post if needed.' as well.
What's next?
We appreciate that this is still not ideal and will continue to see if there's anything further we can do on our end that can help as we continue to wait for the bug to be addressed by Facebook.
[Update] 12 January 2023 @ 14:00 GMT
We have seen an increase in posts over the past week that are undelivered on Facebook with two different errors.
This means:
The first error is the updated error message we have included after October's release to turn off the re-publish option. That error is 'Facebook did not confirm this post was successfully published. Please check on the Facebook Page directly to confirm if it was posted and resend this post if needed.'
When you see this error, it's best to check the Facebook Page to see if the post was successful.
However:
We are also seeing posts continue to go undelivered with 'Looks like Facebook put a restriction on this app. Please contact support for further information and assistance.'
When experiencing this error, we suggest reviewing the Facebook Page, as the post may have been duplicated on the page. In this case, it is best to follow what we've outlined below regarding deleting posts from the Social Feeds area.
[Update] 27 October 2022 @ 14:00 GMT
We have updated how we send posts to Facebook Pages where we see the specific error coming back, which corresponds to the bug on Facebook's end.
This means:
You will still receive an undelivered error, likely advising either that ' 'Looks like there is a temporary Facebook server error. Please resend this post again later.' or 'Looks like Facebook put a restriction on this app. Please contact support for further information and assistance.'
However:
The post should only be published once to the relevant Facebook Page in these cases. If you're unsure, we do still recommend double-checking on the Facebook Page directly or via the relevant Feed on Sendible to double-check that the post has been published successfully before any attempts to re-publish in these cases.
[Monitoring] Duplicate Facebook Posts with an Undelivered Error - 14 October 2022 @ 14:00 GMT
We have recently received several reports from quite a few customers regarding Facebook Page & Group posting issues, some of which include one or more of the following:
- Posts being published more than once at the same time
- Posts being published without an image
- Posts appearing in Undelivered, yet publishing successfully, most commonly with the error: 'Looks like there is a temporary Facebook server error. Please resend this post again later.'
After further examination, it appears that Facebook is currently performing improvements to their platform primarily around the New Page Experience, however, as we have observed in the past and so have our users, when Facebook makes updates/improvements, this tends to affect their functionality’s performance until their improvements are finalized.
All updates any company might make are susceptible to bugs or issues which may affect that platform’s functionality. However, the most likely/common functionality which may be affected on Facebook‘s end is their ability to process posts received via third parties like Sendible, in which case you will encounter issues such as the ones listed above.
This issue has already been reported to Facebook by several third parties, including Sendible. It has been assigned for further investigation, and they are already looking into this, so we are now awaiting an update regarding a resolution.
Not all users are affected; however, these issues appear to be more common where posts are being published to multiple pages simultaneously, and/or have access to or manage a large number of assets via their Facebook Profile.
Until a fix has been released, there may be instances where the issues mentioned above may occur. We are currently looking at ways we might be able to reduce the impact of this bug on our customers, as we appreciate it is far from ideal to have to monitor or correct posts where this happens. In the meantime, the following tips will hopefully save some time if you are impacted by this bug:
- You can monitor your Facebook Page posts in the Activity section by clicking on Activity, then Social Feeds, and selecting the Page you want to check. These are a live feed of your Facebook Page’s home feed, so if your post were published twice, it would be displayed here twice. This way, you can avoid logging into each page individually just to check on your posts, and can complete this check much faster.
- If you do find that there are indeed double posts, you can delete the second post directly from the Home Feed in the Activity section, by clicking on the Delete (🗑️) icon to the right of the post.
- Facebook doesn’t allow this functionality for Facebook Groups, so you will need to access your Group on Facebook in order to check on your posts, and delete any possible second posts.
- In the event that a post has been published without an image, you can delete this post from your Activity section on Sendible, and then Repost the same post again from your Sent folder, and because the issue is not the post but rather how the post was processed by Facebook the first time you published it, you won’t need to make any changes to it in order to re-post it.
If you have any questions with regard to this issue or concerns, please feel free to submit a ticket, and we will get back to you as soon as possible.