I am writing an iPhone app that includes the ability to publish a link to a user’s wall on Facebook using the latest Facebook supplied iOS SDK. To the dialog method I give a name, caption, description, link, and picture in a params dictionary. The method call successfully opens a dialog for the user in the app (after authenticating), where they can add a message and tap Publish. So far, so good.
Looking at the result on the user’s wall, both the title of the post (the “name” in the dictionary mentioned above) and the picture associated with the post are clickable links with the url I specified in the method call (via “link”), as expected. Well almost.
Now the problem: while the link on the post title is exactly as specified, the link on the image has the additional, unwanted query string ?ref=nf appended. I want to know how to suppress this, as it breaks my goo.gl shortened link.
I don’t think this is iOS specific. It happens on this Facebook developer Feed Dialog page as well. Go down to the section Example, and click where it says Click here to try the url yourself, you’ll get a Post To Your Wall page. If you click Publish and then go to your own wall, you will see that the link for the image and the link for the title are different, with the image link including the extra query string. Which is what I want to suppress.
Interestingly, before you publish from the above page, you can hover over the image and the title, and the reverse it true. The title link has the extra query string but the image link is clean. Bizarre. I cannot see if that is also true in my iOS app, since I have no way to “hover” on the iPhone.
Two other data points
- I see this in posts from at least some other apps; the fully expanded links being used there are apparently oblivious to the extra query string information
- I don’t see this if I post directly from my Facebook news feed page from the Facebook web site
Anyone know how to eliminate/suppress this extra query string from the image link when posting programmatically?
Looking at this post in the facebook forums, it appears you would have to strip it manually yourself. I.e. send it to a shortener that you control and doesn’t care about the query string.
They are going to add that query string always. So if you want to handle it gracefully, you need to control where the link goes to initially, or find a url shortener that ignores this parameter.