Facebook like button is asking to confirm the action

Question

To begin with, I've already read the following topics:

• Facebook Like without Confirm?
• Facebook Like button shows the "Confirm" link, but still cannot Like after confirming

Including this topic:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8940749/facebook-likeconfirm-button

There are at least 25 apps hosted under dev.anuary.com host, sub domain of anuary.com. Neither of them ask for "like" action to be confirmed.

Worth mentioning, is that there is another website ( http://sinonimai.lt ) hosted on the same host, that had a fan base of 10 000+ people and was recently disabled by Facebook. I didn't manage to contact Facebook regarding either of the issues, therefore I simply took off the like-box from the latter website. Hopefully, temporarily.

The most annoying of all, is that even if you confirm the "like" action, "like" doesn't get submitted. I've tried on multiple friend accounts, different browsers (possible bug to report?).

I've ignored it for over a month. But it doesn't go away.

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There are no hidden overlays, no bouding elements or anything that'd be considered unusual placement of the "like" button element. The website and the button itself has been placed very recently. The open-graph tags are in place and changing app ID doesn't change the behavior.

<meta property="og:title" content="Anuary"/>
<meta property="og:type" content="company"/>

<meta property="og:image" content="http://anuary.com/public/images/og-anuary-logo.jpg"/>
<meta property="og:url" content="http://anuary.com"/>
<meta property="fb:app_id" content="128740590570428"/>
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Anuary"/>
<meta property="og:description" content="Anuary is a company of accomplished developers and social media experts. We design engaging and innovative social media campaigns, for web and mobile, that are meant to interact with your targeted audience, through applications, websites, competitions and participation events. The objective being to spread the word about the product and increase loyalty to the advertised brand."/>

However, the page content is loaded dynamically. What Facebook parser sees is pretty much an empty page.

Can this be an issue?

Sooksoon

What does the Facebook debugger tell you? – Chiropody

@Lego, nothing that'd look unusual. See for yourself, developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/…. – Sooksoon

possibly related: #7405985 and hyperarts.com/blog/… and #7405985 (short answer: hopefully they will revert soon back to normal, some have more success with iframe or with adding an appid)... – Tisbe

Answer 1

Unfortunately, I think you are running into a recent Facebook change/design decision. Here are a couple bug reports discussing this issue:

http://developers.facebook.com/bugs/274568892605777

http://developers.facebook.com/bugs/169544703153617

Klopstock

Well, if that is the case, then I can report a new bug, because I am the only person who clicks "unlike" after clicking "like" and only for purposes of dev. That'd be funny if they base their anti-spam behavior on one account actions. – Sooksoon

So you're manually liking and unliking the same URL multiple times? That's pretty consistent with what would happen if you were running a site that forced users to click like before continuing, or was using click-jacking, etc to force likes – Semblable

@Igy, not exactly. That'd mean that one user can maliciously like and unlike content multiple times to black-shadow another website? – Sooksoon

@Igy, when you do detect suspicious activity, you should add timed restrictions. Now you are checking if people are going to "confirm" the like they've given. Most likely they won't (why waste time?). I guess your system then adds even more restrictions for the page (which is a deadend). You can also check how many times the page got into timed-lock period and, based on this, set further restrictions. – Sooksoon

fyi: these developer links are dead now. they are going to developers.facebook.com/x/bugs/trending ... I really thought the internet was done with deprecating links but I guess this will never end will it? – Halland

@TheodoreR.Smith but eventually permamarks.net will shut down just like everything else. :/ – Halland

@Halland OK Eventually every backup services will shutdown, too. The difference is that Random Site probably does NOT have the passion for keeping rare cultural content alive, like I do. I run www.PermaMarks.net and being a 21st Century digital scribe, preserving digital content is my tertiary life mission, and I am highly dedicated to it. – Sharpen

Answer 2

Use the Facebook Debug tool to see what content is on the page. http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug

It shows you what Facebook sees when it scrapes the page. It could help in identifying what the underlying issue is.

With regards to liking / unliking content multiple times, Facebook has some automatic features that prevent likes from showing up on Facebook, or indeed showing the 'Confirm' link you are seeing. This is mainly to combat click-jacking as this is a common problem with the Like button.

Flowage

I was just testing a like button and using the debug tool. Like, unlike, like, etc to make sure my content is showing up correctly. Now I am getting the 'confirm' and there doesn't seem to be a way to undo this. Is it IP address based? I just had a co-worker do it and he's getting the same result. – Halland

Answer 3

The issue which I faced was when I had my page in production server and then when I was making modifications on my development/testing server it came up with 'confirm'. So it seems to think that I am trying to spam 'like' through different pages to achieve a higher ranking but all I am doing is trying to test my changes on a different server before uploading them to production server. I am not comfortable with making changes straight into production as it could blow up in my face with buggy code or an undesired layout.

Swartz