Facebook Changed Sharing Counts

Today, Facebook released version 2.7 of their APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. and changed the manner in which shared posts are counted.

That would have been okay, except they also turned off the part of the 1.0 API (the one that didn’t use versions in their URLs because who needed that?) and blindsided everyone. Reading the Facebook Dev Changelog didn’t make that any more sensible to me either. But what I can tell you is here are some affected plugins/services:

  • Jetpack: https://github.com/Automattic/jetpack/pull/4879
  • Genesis Simple Share Buttons: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/facebook-share-counts-not-showing
  • SharedCount: https://www.sharedcount.com/notes/facebook_api_shutdown.php

Anyone who has a pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party (or theme) with sharing buttons that count MAY be affected. If someone can come up with a way to scan the repository for impacted plugins, let me know and I’ll be happy to do that and email as many of them directly as we can.

#api, #boom