hmmm… what?
Facebook hates TinyURL -or- Facebook is on crack
26May2008 Filed under: Days Go By Author: ValOne of my Facebook friends sent me a private message and so, of course, I was answering the message. I typed up my response, it wasn’t terribly long and I only had included two links, no multimedia. When I hit send, though, this is the message I received:
Now, in case that image is failing for some reason, Facebook gave me the message: “Content rejected. Some of the content you included in this message is not allowed by Facebook.”
Yes, as you can see, my friend was asking me about the digital scrapbooking pages I uploaded last night. So what was in my message? Two links and some text about photos, digital scrapbooking freebies, and Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.
Not only, though, did Facebook not send my message, it also didn’t save it, or show me where I’d gone wrong so I could edit… whatever it was… out of the message.
I tried again.
Got the same message.
Had a thought and I removed the first link. It went through. Yup, the problem was the tinyURL link I’d included as a short link to show where one can get Elements 6 cheaper: tinyurl.com/2co7c4.
So I’m guessing that Facebook doesn’t like TinyURL because it can’t follow it and know what the link is to create a preview? I went to the help pages, the section about messaging and all I can find regarding links in messages is the following:
There are two main ways to include a link in your message.
1. Start by clicking “Add Link” in the “Attach” section below the Message field. Next, copy and paste a link to any sort of media (blog, news article, website, video, music) into the “Share link” box and then click “Attach.”
2. When you are not on Facebook, use our Share functionality (either in the form of our Share Bookmarklet or the Share on Facebook Links) to send a message with the link to that site included in the message.In both of these cases, the links you are sharing will generate previews that will be visible in the body of your message.
I never use either of these methods. I put the link in, Facebook creates the preview, and I usually remove the preview because it’s friggin’ annoying.
So, what’s the deal, Facebook? Much like when I wrote about Yahoo’s Captcha (over two years ago), I think it’s ridiculous that the message is not saved. Facebook should let us know what’s not allowed, at least in the FAQ, but moreso in the error message itself. How can one follow the rules if he/she doesn’t know what they are? :)
- Tags: error annoying, facebook, messaging, on crack, ridiculous
10 Responses to “Facebook hates TinyURL -or- Facebook is on crack”
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loz
May 26th, 2008 at 4.38 pm
something like this happened to me, as with everything technological, nothing is perfect. i was writing on a friend’s wall when a warning message popped up saying i was using this feature to spam my friends. I was clueless and caught off guard by the threat that they were going to suspend my account. i emailed the help at facebook and the responded a couple days later saying it was an error and nothing to worry about.
Anonymous
May 27th, 2008 at 12.45 am
yep, i setup an event page tonight and i wasn’t able to but “tinyurl.com” in the description.
Sakura
May 27th, 2008 at 7.43 am
Wow. Why don’t you upload the pic?
BTW, how did you code your text areas?
Val
May 27th, 2008 at 7.18 pm
Sakura, I’m not sure what you mean by the pic unless the pixelation I put in the image and that is to protect my friend’s identity, for their privacy.
The image and styling of my text areas is using CSS. The following is my code:
textarea, input {background-image: url(textarea.jpg);
background-x-position: left;
background-y-position: top;
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-color: #d7ca96;
}
Keilaron
June 5th, 2008 at 6.38 pm ♥
An error? More like intentional filtering. I honestly would not be surprised if they were actually intentionally denying links which use TinyURL; It’s not like you can easily preview the content of those links and people use them all the time for pranks and .. well, yeah.
So I doubt this issue will be “fixed”.
Val
June 5th, 2008 at 7.43 pm
Well, yes, both an error and intentional filtering. I doubt it will be changed, either, but the least Facebook can do is put it in the FAQ and at least tell you, “sorry, TinyURL links are not allowed, please remove or change the link you have submitted” rather than just trashing your message. That isn’t right.
Keilaron
June 8th, 2008 at 12.39 am ♥
No, the least they can do is what they’re doing now. Big sites have a tendency to do this, claim it’s an error, and never “fix” it, nor openly admit that that is what they are doing.
Part of the reason is that if they say they are blocking site X and Y, everyone will start using site Z. And if that one gets blocked, another one will show up, and so on so forth.
They therefore don’t have much of a reason to put it up anywhere (at least in their own view). Of course, this is all under the assumption that it’s intentional.
If it’s not, then they wouldn’t put it under the FAQ because they will eventually fix it and don’t want to admit the bug anyway.
It would be nice of them to actually indicate that the link is the issue, but you didn’t have much difficulty figuring out that was the issue anyway.
I don’t use Facebook much, though, so I suppose I can’t comment on the “they shouldn’t trash your message” part — you mean they completely dump your message and don’t let you modify it? You have to completely retype it? That isn’t right, for sure.
Otherwise, I understand (if not fully agree with) their actions.
‘sides, as a geek I’ve never really understood the need for TinyURL and it’s derivatives; Most URLs aren’t that ugly, and those that are can generally be trimmed down. I’ve been considering making a web tool that would do that, but figured most people are happy enough using TinyURL anyway.
Val
July 27th, 2008 at 8.54 pm
I needed to give that link to someone else on Facebook and I remembered I hadn’t replied here. Ironically enough, Facebook let me put that TinyURL in a comment on a photo. So, out of curiosity, I sent a test message to a friend and it let me include the TinyURL this time!
The URL I am trying to send is about 3 feet long, that’s why I’m using TinyURL, I really don’t ever use it otherwise.
Keilaron
July 29th, 2008 at 12.51 pm ♥
Yeah, but I dare say that likely most of that URL could be dropped and the link would still work. It’s amazing. If I made a link trimming service I think it would be as popular as TinyURL… …but the reason such a thing doesn’t exist yet is the amount of work that has to go into it (I mean, there’s the obvious blank parts you can remove, but after that it becomes a game of “So, does this site ACTUALLY use this part of the URL?”. eBay can be really nasty for that if you’re doing searches.).
Val
July 31st, 2008 at 4.04 pm
Ahhh yes, that is true