Facebook requests dialog not showing message to recepient

Question

If I invoke this:

    FB.ui({
        method: 'apprequests',
        title: 'Who would you like to invite?',
        message: 'Hello there'
    });

The 'preview' in the requests dialog that comes up asking me to select recepients, suggests that the recipient(s) will will get the message "Hello there".

But all they get is:

'name' send you a request in 'app'

which does not motivate them to click on it.

Anybody else getting this problem? Any solutions?

Disjoin

The screenshots on the post developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/requests show the users getting the "hello there" message you specify below the default Facebook title. Can you post a screenshot? – Crenulation

Ok, so this all boiled down to an misunderstanding by me. I expected the "Hello there" message to come up in the notifications in the top menu of Facebook - where the red numbers come up. Facebook calls them diamonds. This does not happen. In that notification menu, you'll only get the precanned 'name' sent you a request in 'app'. The message field (Hello there) will be visible in the Apps Notifications view, which is gotten to by clicking on Apps in the left hand menu. Doh! But, as an aside, this is still not a very compelling way to invite people - most of my invites are ignored. – Disjoin

Answer 1

You can change the message in the notification if you pass the "new_style_message" parameter in the FB.ui method. This will change the format of the notification from:

$name sent you a request in $app

to

$name $message in $app

When passing a custom message field using this parameter you are limited to a certain number of characters, the title parameter is ignored (for the notification, it will still show on the games/apps page), and you cannot change the "in $app" suffix so your message will need to be a short sentence fragment:

FB.ui({
    method: 'apprequests',
    message: 'sent you an awesome request'
    new_style_message: true
});

Note that this is an undocumented feature; official support might be unreliable and it may change in the future without warning.

Peacock

Looks like Facebook removed that undocumented property now. – Barty

Hi, I used new_style_message and it worked for some time. Now it stopped working! Instead I always get "user invited you to play", if the recipient is not a user, and "user has send you a request" if the recipient is a user of the app.. – Electrolyse

However, it still works for Branchout (just tested it... ). Any ideas? – Electrolyse

Was looking at Branchouts code. Looks like they have some extra parameters. Maybe they have special FB access that allows them to do this. An extra parameter here "sdk=joey"... Anyways, here's what they have, access tokens and friends: frictionless=true&locale=en_US&message=asked to add you as a professional contact. Accept invite ->&new_style_message=true&sdk=joey&title=Add Friends&_fb_noscript=1" – Gardenia