I am just getting into adding Facebook opengraph into my app. I want to get certain graph attributes from the user, but it needs to be done continuously, even when the person is not on the site. Basically the app requires a background process that fetches content from the user’s Facebook activity feed.
So my first step was to store the user’s access token in a table and regularly run a cron task. However I discovered that Facebook is moving towards deprecating offline access. I know this may sound stupid to those of you who are familiar with this, but I am not sure what this means, and wanted to confirm.
My understanding is:
- Beginning in May when Facebook completely switches to offline access deprecated mode, even if I store a user’s access token, it will expire in 60 days.
- So I could re-store the user’s access token everytime she/he signs into my app
- But if the user doesn’t sign back into the service for more than 60 days, it’s all over and the background task won’t be able to crawl content from the user anymore.
- Which means, for example if it was a newsletter service that sends users useful information based on the activities, if I don’t ask them to sign in (they may visit my site to check out the content but the site doesn’t require them to sign in to view content), the engine will stop operating after 60 days and the user will just forget about it.
Is this correct?
Check out: https://developers.facebook.com/roadmap/offline-access-removal/ It has all the answers.
But basically yes. Offline_Access is coming to an end.