Hey Everyone,
I wanted to give you all a head up that Facebook is making some changes that will (and for some people already have) affect leenk.me. I've notice a few people who have had an "expiration" time attached to the access token that Facebook give leenk.me. The access token is what allows leenk.me to send content on your behalf when you publish a new post. The way Facebook use to work is 3rd party developers like myself could request an access token with "offline access", which basically meant it worked forever (or until the user changed their password or remove the app from their profile). Facebook is now planning on removing the offline access ability from their API. So, in preparation for this change (which is coming May 2nd, 2012), I have been testing their new requirements and have already made a few changes to leenk.me to start to deal with what Facebook is requiring. Over the next week I will continue to make changes until I have a solution in place that will cause YOU the least amount of pain.
So far it is going well though. I've removed the request for the "offline access" and have set my app in Facebook to disable that feature altogether. Facebook is handle these access tokens in two ways, it will hand out a token that expires in 2-hours or a token that will expire in 60-days. I am still testing the 60-day tokens to make sure they will work as I expect them to. It looks like I will be able to "renew" the 60-day tokens before they expire to get a new 60-day token. Basically replicating the previous "offline access" token I was able to use. However, in the case that I am unable to do this, it may require you to reset your Facebook connection to leenk.me every 60 days.
While I am working on this, I have also started implement some new error reporting within the beta version of the leenk.me plugin. Ultimately, this change by Facebook is pushing back the development of the plugin, but I think in the end we'll all be better off. There will be better error reporting and more helpful messages.
Facebook is by far that social network that I end up having to do the most support for. Let's just say that they do not handle the oAuth standard in a "traditional" manner. As I said, my goal here is to make this as simple as possible and not require you to do any extra work. Hopefully that goal will be accomplished. If you have any questions or need any support, as always, feel free to contact me.
