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My brief, frustrating experience maintaining a Facebook application consisted of the app breaking every two weeks as Facebook somewhat randomly changed things w

by Eduard 13y ago

My brief, frustrating experience maintaining a Facebook application consisted of the app breaking every two weeks as Facebook somewhat randomly changed things without warning. When did you have this experience? How long ago is it? For now quite some time, Facebook has been open with upcoming "breaking changes", giving Facebook App developers three months in advance to adapt accordingly: https://developers.facebook.com/roadmap/change-policy/ https://developers.facebook.com/roadmap/change-policy/

mratzloff 13y ago
2007-2008.
ThomPete 13y ago
I built https://apps.facebook.com/pinviewer/ https://apps.facebook.com/pinviewer/ in 2012 and even up to there, FB changed things all the time without any warning.
btipling 13y ago
2008-2009 I dealt with the Facebook API and they often broke things. The breaking changes notifications have improved things, but they still break things. Their insight analytics was broken for about a year. They just don't seem to care about their API.
- vinbreau 13y ago
  Agreed. I've been working with their API for the last 2 years. When it does break it can take forever to get a response. I work for a Facebook preferred developer so we have an extra channel for getting bug feedback. If we weren't a preferred developer, we would have had API bugs go unaddressed for months. Sure there were warnings about some changes, but sometimes major changes occurred that we did not see coming and had to scramble to figure out workarounds.
ripter 13y ago
How about two weeks ago? They fail to mention in their list of breaking changes that the id format would changed from profileId_postId_commentId to profileId:postId:commentIdThatMightContainUnderscores Except that not all posts follow the new ID format. Not all new posts even follow it. It's now a mix of the two.
- rmc 13y ago
  Here here. You can't trust the Facebook docs to be complete. I have numerous comments in our codebase of "Facebook API docs are wrong, it's actually X..."
  - ripter 13y ago
    Somewhere on the site they actually tell you to use Stackoverflow because it's more up to date.
    - chrisblizzard 13y ago
      Do you have an example?
  - return0 13y ago
    It's odd that they chose stackoverflow for their support system, because most of the answered questions there are way obsolete by now.
    - wwweston 13y ago
      They chose StackOverflow for their support system at one point. At one point, they've also chosen a web forum, a wiki lots of devs bought into (but which they later entirely blew away and replaced with Bing searches of their site), and probably a half-dozen attempts at official on-site docs. When I saw they'd offloaded to StackOverflow, I thought that was an idea that had some promise, but the big question in my mind was how long until it reached the critical mass where it would consist of more out-of-date answers than current ones. And what they'd do when it does. The answer, of course, is likely move fast and break something, and heaven help the people who had the idea of building something on top of their quicksand.
return0 13y ago
Preannounced or not, the fact is it's a dizzying rate for independent developers to catch up with.

by Eduard 13y ago

mratzloff 13y ago

2007-2008.

ThomPete 13y ago

I built https://apps.facebook.com/pinviewer/ https://apps.facebook.com/pinviewer/ in 2012 and even up to there, FB changed things all the time without any warning.

btipling 13y ago

2008-2009 I dealt with the Facebook API and they often broke things. The breaking changes notifications have improved things, but they still break things. Their insight analytics was broken for about a year. They just don't seem to care about their API.

vinbreau 13y ago
Agreed. I've been working with their API for the last 2 years. When it does break it can take forever to get a response. I work for a Facebook preferred developer so we have an extra channel for getting bug feedback. If we weren't a preferred developer, we would have had API bugs go unaddressed for months. Sure there were warnings about some changes, but sometimes major changes occurred that we did not see coming and had to scramble to figure out workarounds.

ripter 13y ago

How about two weeks ago? They fail to mention in their list of breaking changes that the id format would changed from profileId_postId_commentId to profileId:postId:commentIdThatMightContainUnderscores Except that not all posts follow the new ID format. Not all new posts even follow it. It's now a mix of the two.

rmc 13y ago
Here here. You can't trust the Facebook docs to be complete. I have numerous comments in our codebase of "Facebook API docs are wrong, it's actually X..."
- ripter 13y ago
  Somewhere on the site they actually tell you to use Stackoverflow because it's more up to date.
  - chrisblizzard 13y ago
    Do you have an example?
- return0 13y ago
  It's odd that they chose stackoverflow for their support system, because most of the answered questions there are way obsolete by now.
  - wwweston 13y ago
    They chose StackOverflow for their support system at one point. At one point, they've also chosen a web forum, a wiki lots of devs bought into (but which they later entirely blew away and replaced with Bing searches of their site), and probably a half-dozen attempts at official on-site docs. When I saw they'd offloaded to StackOverflow, I thought that was an idea that had some promise, but the big question in my mind was how long until it reached the critical mass where it would consist of more out-of-date answers than current ones. And what they'd do when it does. The answer, of course, is likely move fast and break something, and heaven help the people who had the idea of building something on top of their quicksand.

return0 13y ago

Preannounced or not, the fact is it's a dizzying rate for independent developers to catch up with.