As mentioned in this other question, if a user grants the publish_stream permission, I can publish to that user’s wall using an app access_token. I tested that and it works. But I couldn’t publish to the user’s pages using the app access_token! Am I missing something?
Right now I use the /me/accounts/ connection to get the access_token of the pages, and use that to publish. But this is a huge headache for me and for users because these tokens expire often (when users change their password, …et), and every time that happens the publish fails and I need to email the user to come login again so I can retrieve a new access_token for the page. It’s a bad user experience and I’m trying to find a way around it. The app token works for publishing to users, which is great, but I couldn’t find a way to make it work for pages. Any tips?
Edit:
To clarify further, I currently request the manage_pages and offline_access permissions, and then fetch the access_token of each page and use that to publish to it. That works. The main problem is that tokens expire, even with the offline_access permission. The most common reason a token would expire is if the user changes her password. Here is a common error that I get a lot when publishing to Facebook pages.
Facebook error. type: OAuthException, message: ‘Error validating
access token: Session does not match current stored session. This may
be because the user changed the password since the time the session
was created or Facebook has changed the session for security reasons.’
To handle this, I email the user and ask them to visit our app again, and when they do I grab a fresh set of access_token to work with. But that’s problematic because users are confused about why the error happened and blame us for it, and some users don’t open their emails so the problem doesn’t get solved and then they’re angry later when they discover that our app had stopped weeks ago without them asking it to stop.
That’s why I was hoping that I can publish with the app access_token to avoid these problems. Since it works for user profiles, I hoped it would work for pages as well. But so far no luck, unless I’m missing something obvious.
What you’re describing used to work – all last year we were able to successfully post to fan page walls using the app access token. In fact, for some of our users, I see it still working. However, I think the other two answers are correct, this is no longer the way to post to pages (see “Page Login” here)
That said, you should be able to store the access token of the page to spare yourself the step of re-querying the users’ linked accounts.
Unfortunately, the page’s access token will suffer the same fragility as a user’s, per the answer here: Facebook Page Access Tokens – Do these expire? . The page access token will expire when the user who gave you that access token changes their password.