No its not spam I have researched the problem quite a bit over past few days.One of the reason why you get no thumbnail, or unrelated thumbnail is because facebook’s script is not smart enough. On each page load, it searches for all image tags and display the ones that it finds useful. Sometimes the script times out without even loading the right image. To get around this issue, facebook recommends developers to tell the script exactly which image to pick by adding a meta tag in the header. such as
I am trying to figure this out now, btw i have no idea what kind of tag or line of code to add i just found that on a site. Does anyone have any ideas on how to fix the random thumbnail problem? Right now its finding that unionjack and slinging that in.
the problem is, that the head / footer files are one for all the site, when i try to put the code into an individual html block the code is stripped out and it doesn't work. but if i put it into the header of the site, it will be one picture for everything when that's not how its meant to work, its meant to be different pictures per page content
the problem is, that the head / footer files are one for all the site, when i try to put the code into an individual html block the code is stripped out and it doesn't work. but if i put it into the header of the site, it will be one picture for everything when that's not how its meant to work, its meant to be different pictures per page content
Hi Voni, sorry I got very busy yesterday!
This is what I have for you... [edit]
I use the "addthis" widget. I added to our standard "recommend" box.
This problem is still occurring, it briefly seemed to rectify but is now doing the same thing. The og:image that fb apps is recognizing is actually this........ http://shoomblitz.com/media/images/flags/en.gif
this is why i am seeing the bleary unionjack i mention in my first post. I have scrambled around facebook, messed about with code for frickin ages until i decided to make the 'like' directly on a webpage on my website, so a normal html page, not dolpin page and low behold it worked perfectly. Therefore i can only conclude the issue is with dolphin not facebook. Initially i thought the problem might be template related, so i changed the template back to the default template and cleared cash, but the problems still occurs. I guess I could make i frames of all the pages i want to 'like' but the link would in actual fact go to the html page and not my dolphin site.
Has anyone managed to overcome this problem because i am stuck now, just been messing about with this for so long now i am starting feel unwell lol, i think its becoming an obsession!
Are you certain it is a Dolphin issue? I've had a few people message me on Facebook wondering what the hell is going on cuz their complete timelines have disappeared & other strange issues in the last 24 hours. Facebook has a lot of issues on a regular basis so I wouldn't rule out it being their problem. Personally speaking I think it's hugely overrated & I wouldn't waste my time connecting to it with my Dolphin site.
yes its a dolphin issue, if it works perfectly on a normal html page on my website, and whether i change the template or not it won't work on dolphin, this would suggest by process of elimination the problem is dolphin related. thus i am stuck with what to do next
The problem is dolphin does not create open graph meta tags within the header of the page. And facebook pretty much requires them. Although using things such as sharethis or addthis on the page will pass parameters to facebook to tell it what to use, It will still ignore it if the image passed is to small, or it can't find it on the page, and it still prefers the open graph tags.
Also, in dolphin, some pages images are specified as a CSS background while the forground or actual image tag is just a spacer. Thats a method dolphin uses to prevent people from right clicking to easily grab peoples images. The problem is, facebook only looks at img tags for images. It will not look at css background images.
Another issue with facebook is it likes big images. So even if a specified image is passed, if it is less than 200x200 it may ignore it if it finds a bigger image on the page. Facebook actually recommends images of at least 600x315 and prefers 1200x630. Documented here. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/howtos/maximizing-distribution-media-content/ under item #4.
Although it is a clumsy way of doing it, i have a tool in the market called Head Injections that will allow you to put anything in-between the <head> tags on a per page basis. And this includes open graph meta tags. Forum pages will not work with this mod tho. Thats the best you can do until dolphin adds built in open graph meta tags which i believe is planned for a upcoming version.
Also when specifying images in og tags in the header, they will be ignored if other og tags such as description, title and url are not present. Facebook is very picky.
it worked!!!!!!! I had to learn how to do meta tagging, goodness this coding stuff is challenging my blondness I shall have to be brunette soon if i learn much more!
