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PledgeBank Facebook application disabled

Written by on September 18th, 2008 in PledgeBank, Technical

Unfortunately, I’ve had to disable the PledgeBank Facebook application. It used to let you sign and share pledges from within Facebook.

Facebook recently changed their platform (again!), breaking our code for sending success/failure messages. Obviously, it is no good signing up to a pledge if you don’t get informed when it succeeds.

I tried to fix it, but couldn’t work out how to do so quickly. We don’t have the time and money at the moment to chase after this, so I’ve disabled the application entirely. Links to PledgeBank pages on Facebook now redirect to pledgebank.com.

Hopefully it’ll be back one day – do send us emails if you miss it (or money if you have a large pledge that really needs it!). I think there may be a better solution with a simpler interface – the current application tried too hard to reimplement all of PledgeBank within Facebook. And besides, we should be supporting OpenSocial now it exists. It’s an open standard, Facebook isn’t.

Technical details: We used infinite session keys to send notifications from cron jobs. Quite reasonably, this no longer works. However, I couldn’t find out what to use instead. I think Facebook should respect backwards compatibility of its APIs a lot more, and if it breaks it they should give clear instructions about what to use instead. This does put me off ever wanting to develop anything on their platform again.

One Comment

  1. Tony says:

    Facebook seems faceless to me in relation to the robotic effects of FARCEbook trying to protect themselves from what their farcebots consider is ’spam’. One might have thought that people would use the same message on a large portion of friends saving time on re-writing BUT not FARCEbook who see it as a dangerous action. Sadly their farcebots can’t tell the difference from adverts and social connectivity of human beings – though one could think that checking up on private messages sent to friends to invite them to connect fell outside the scope of control and into the scope of privacy.
    Of course don’t get me started on someone being disabled not getting the right of reply – defending themselves with being able to collect their history and not knowing what the hell they’ve been ‘disabled’ – ‘crippled’ – cut off or whatever else you’d like to call it. I don’t know if anyone’s read Franz Kafka ‘The Trial” but it certainly seemed poignant to me FARCEbook appears very Kafkaesque. Faceless farce book!

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