Question

I’m creating a facebook dialog here that links to an external site (not from my domain). In the preview the link shows up correctly, but when the message is viewed in the inbox the url has been changed.

Specifically, I call this function:

var link = "http://someexternalsite.com/?id=xxx"
var desc = "a description"

    FB.ui(
      {
        method: 'send',
        name: 'title',
        link: link,
        picture: 'http://mysite.com/somepicture.jpg',
        description: desc
      },
      function(response) {}
    )

And the link changes (when viewed in your facebook inbox) to

http://facebook.com/someexternalsite

Is there some unwritten security policy somewhere? Do I need to get permission from someexternalsite.com to link to their site?

Answer 1

Facebook keeps control of the links that are posted. That way if a link is to a virus or a malicious site, Facebook just needs to change their URL.