FB, having updated their API to disallow generic shares (Oct 2012), now require us to utilise built-in actions. Moving on from there, we can use Mention Tagging (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/mention_tagging/) to allow messages and mentions be created – this is all fine.
However, on the same page above they say “You must also describe step-by-step how users can add/remove tags in your app.” – but they neglect describing what call must be made to the API to do so.
Has anyone else done this successfully?
Say I have a user who’s mentioned 5 people in an action post. Then say one of them would like to be untagged. I provide them a link to allow them to untag themselves, but what call should be made to the API.
Has anyone got any experience at this? All help appreciated.
Paul G
I don’t think you have to offer a link for tag removal to the other users that have been tagged by your user. Standard FB functionality through the facebook.com UI should enable them to do that already.
It does not make much sense to me to offer such links on your own to people that have been tagged by your app’s user, but might not even be using your app themselves. (To ensure that they are legitimately requesting to be un-tagged, you’d have to identify them first – by having them connect to your app. I don’t think that’s how Facebook want it to be.)
To me, the intention of the guidelines is more to ensure that you are building a clearly understandable UI for your app, for the process of the user entering his message. If they start to type @PaulG, and you want to “translate” that into a tag, f.e. by highlighting it in the text edit box like it happens on facebook.com, then it a) has to be absolutely clear to your user, that they are tagging someone this way, and b) you have to give your user a way of removing that tag right there and then (before posting his message), in case he does not want to tag a user, but just have the characters “@PaulG” stand for themselves in his message.