Facebook RSS Import fails and what you can do against it

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It must be true.... the bigger and powerful they get, the worse is the support and the technical stability. Yes, you got that right, I'm talking about Facebook.

For several years I used the RSS import function, to directly import my blog articles directly to my wall - without having to double-post it. According to the access logs, the 'Facebook Feed Parser' looked 2-3 times a day at my RSS feed to check for updates. Although the Feed Parser was very 'rude' with handling some of my contents (by removing html tags, or exchanging ascii chars), it still worked and got the article posted on the wall and in the 'Notes' section. Until this spring.

Suddenly Facebook didn't import new articles anymore. That was sometime in March. I wrote to Facebook but of course never got an answer - but three weeks later it mysteriously worked again and imported the missing articles. But then again, back in June the import failed again. I checked the access logs and there were no visits of the 'Facebook Feed Parser' anymore. The last 'social visit' was on June 3rd; since then imports = null.

Obviously, there have always been problems with the RSS imports and Facebook didn't really care about fixing it as this discussion clearly shows it. Luckily, I found posts in this topic, about alternatives: RSS Graffiti as an example. I quickly tested it and it is a hundred times better, faster and smarter than the Facebook one. And: It simply works.

Final note: If you want to let Facebook import your (blog-) articles by using an RSS feed, don't waste time by waiting for Facebook fixing something they probably don't even know is defect, start to use RSS Graffiti.

Update July 20th: I can't believe my eyes... Facebook's RSS import started working again - after more than one month of downtime. What is going on there... ?


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