Hey Emil,
I tried the code you gave above and was unsuccessful on getting the plugin to work. Please keep us posted. Thanks!
Facebook’s Activity Feed just broke all over the Internet. I noticed on ZDNet at first (pictured on the right), but a quick on other websites shows that every website that uses the social network’s Activity Feed is also affected.
I found three separate bug reports on Facebook Developers describing the issue, but all of them are from last week. All of them have been marked as fixed by Facebook engineers Zhen Fang and Stephen Doyle. Here they are: Invalid Action Type on Recommendations plugin, Recommendation plugin - invalid action type, and Activity Feed throwing error of “invalid action type”.
It’s not clear how widespread this issue is, but right now it seems to be affecting every single website I have checked. I have noticed that ZDNet’s Facebook integrations have been acting up this month, but this seems to be the worse issue yet.
This is definitely separate from the Facebook outage that occurred last week and I also don’t think it’s related to the Facebook Platform’s JavaScript (JS) Software Development Kit (SDK) issues over the weekend. If you know otherwise, please do let me know.
I have contacted Facebook and will update you if I hear back.
Update: It seems the bug reports are starting to come in for today as well. Here are two:
- Recommend plugin boxes down: The FB Recommend plugin box is down at latimes.com and on many other sites.
- Recommendations plugin - invalid action type – again: We have again problem with recommendations plugin on our sites. We can’t see any data in recommendation plugin on my several websites (www.tvn24.pl, www.kontakt24.tvn.pl). In this place is red tittle “Invalid action type”.
Update 2: I believe the problem is that the Facebook plugin needs a new action attribute. It didn’t didn’t require it before, but now it does. This was the temporary solution used by some people last week. I have not tested this on ZDNet because I don’t have access to the site’s code, but if you’re experiencing this problem, give it a try.
You probably have a more complicated version of something like this right now:
<fb:activity site="zdnet.com">
</fb:activity>
Try adding action=”recommend”:
<fb:activity site="zdnet.com" action="recommend">
</fb:activity>
It’s a simple fix, but again I haven’t been able to test it on a large website to see if this is the only issue. If you do, let me know if this works for you. Alternatively, you can just wait till Facebook fixes the issue.
Update 3: This solution works for some, but not for others. Facebook still hasn’t got back to me, so we wait.
Update 4 (11:30 AM PST): Facebook engineer Zhen Fang posted the following comment on both bug reports: “We have a fix for this issue and it will be pushed soon. Stay tuned.”
Update 5 (1:30 PM PST): Just like that, the issue has been fixed, and the Activity Feed works once again on all the websites I was seeing it break on, including ZDNet.
See also:
