Facebook Comments

IMPORTANT: Facebook comments isn’t working right now, I’m looking for someone to take over this to make it work. Leave a comment.

Basically a new version can start using the facebook comments API for notes, but will still have to match note ids to wordpress URLs by screen scraping facebook like the original plugin.

Old Info:
For a while I’ve been using Adam Hill’s facebook comment importer, to get comments from facebook back in to my blog. I recently realised it wasn’t working, so I tried Thomas Albright’s edit, no joy there either. Did some debugging and got it working my self. You can download it here: facebooknotes.php.

All new changes have been commented incase they need to be moved back, though I think my version is the only one being actively maintained at the moment.

Change Log:
0.36
Latest fixes for facebook with changes from Benjamin Trice
0.33
Option to not import comments for posts whose comment status is closed.
0.32
Should work for pages and situations where there facebook user specified in wordpress isn’t friends with the commenter on the note.
0.31
Removed debug statement
0.30
Fix for the latest version of facebook!
0.29
Option not to notify (email) of new comments from facebook
0.28
Option to import from every page of notes from facebook, not just the first one.
0.27
Version 2.5.1 introduced that the GUID might not be the permalink (http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6492). The plugin now uses a different method for converting the URL to a post ID. Should also fix some earlier problems with the “Original Comment Post Not Found” error.
0.26
Version 0.26 with fix for latest facebook HTML mark up
0.25
Fix added by Aaron Harp to allow thie plugin to work with feedburner


Reader Comments

  1. This is the plugin that I’ve been looking for, it’s a great one! Are you in the process of making it compatible with WordPress 2.5?

  2. Did the Feedburner issue ever get figured out? Feedburner rewrites all the post permalinks for stats keeping so the plugin looks up these URLs and doesn’t find anything. I’ll probably go in and figure this out later, but I wanted to check first and see if someone had fixed it. It’d be nice to fix this in the main release as many people use Feedburner for their feeds. Thanks for your work on this.

  3. I’ll have a look at it sometime, probably won’t be for a while. I’ve got to upgrade a lot of blogs I maintain to wordress 2.5 first.

    If you figure out something that works first though let me know, and I’ll include it in the official version of the plugin.

  4. A great idea for a plugin — is there anything I’m supposed to do to modify the plugin so it’ll work? I’ve set up my FB to receive my WP posts and I’ve got comments over at FB that I’d love to have appear on my WP post… but I’ve installed the plugin and the posts aren’t showing up.
    Any help would be appreciated – thanks!

  5. Hi James, I’ve installed it on my wordpress 2.5, but its not working. The plugin page says its compatible up to 2.3, so, should I wait for your magic?

  6. I really appreciate the work you guys are doing. I had a look at the source there, and there’s enough regexes in there, I’m surprised even PHP can understand them.

    I’m getting the “Error, original comment post not found…” error, and it’s driving me nuts. But there’s no way I’m going to hack around with that. It’s crazy. :-P

  7. yep, those were inherited from the orginal plugin that I edited when it stopped working, and no one else updated it. when they go wrong they can be a pain to figure out.

    can’t wait till I finally crack where that error is coming from, or maybe if i’m lucky some else will do before me :-P

  8. James, I’m running wp 2.5, and the plugin does not seem to be working. Any tips? Or, plans to make it compatible? Thank you!

  9. Hi!
    I’m using WP 2.5, which I just realized you might not support yet, but my bug is still salient.
    ALL my FB comments, NOT just on my imported posts, are being imported into the comments DB.
    The part that might be WP 2.5-related is that its importing them all into post #1 (Hello World), but I’m not sure. I’m definitely a little complicated, I’m using a custom URL on WP (does that affect things?) and feedburner from there, to go to FB. Maybe that’s what is causing it problems with importing to the correct blog # and so it just defaults to 1 everytime?

  10. Hey everyone, my blog is now at the latest version of WordPress, so I’ll be testing Facebook comments with that.

    I have noticed that it is no longer importing comments at all for me, though this was caused by changes to the facebook HTML not upgrading my wordpress. Will let you know when its fixed.

  11. I meant a mission to keep up with facbeook.

    WordPress is normally ok, but with 2.5+ I’ve realised they’ve changed what the GUID means in the database, so it won’t always be the permalink, so I need to come up with another way to compare.

  12. James – running wp 2.5 latest and 0.27.This is the error I’m getting:

    Warning: curl_setopt() [function.curl-setopt]: CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION cannot be activated when in safe_mode or an open_basedir is set in [EDITEDOUT/public_html/wp-content/plugins/facebooknotes.php on line 252]

  13. Has this ever worked for you, or are you a first time you’ve tried? There was nothing changed with that part of the script, so I’m guessing this is the first time you tried to use it.

    Its something to do with your curl setup on your server, though I’m not sure specifically whats wrong.

    Ok everyone, I was in a good mood, so I’ve edited things again, and there’s now version 0.28 which will go through ever page of facebook notes, not just the first one.

  14. First time – tried again with 0.28. Same problem, plus “cannot find original post”, etc. Thanks though.

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  16. Hey dude, just wanted to say thanks so much for updating your plugin. The latest updates have done the trick and it’s now fully compatible with the latest WP 2.5.1 engine (at least, as far as I can tell!)

    Btw, I couldn’t help but notice on your blog that a) you’re from Hong Kong, and b) you’re a Christian. So am I, and I figured the English-speaking Christian community in HK can’t be all that huge.

    Well anyhow, Facebook tells me we have mutual friends. I take it you go to The Vine? I’ve been there myself quite a few times, but when I’m in town I usually go to ECC.

  17. Does this work in 2.6? I’m having troubles getting the comments to import at all! (Er, namely, they don’t, but don’t give me an error message?)

  18. Hi, I haven’t tested it on 2.6 yet, but I don’t see why it should’t. I’ll upgrade my blog sometime and let you know.

  19. I just ran it on 2.6 and it works fine, so there’s something else going wrong. Can you send me a screenshot of what happens when you click manually import comments?

  20. Um, what exactly do you wan to put in your sidebar? What facebook comments does is import comments on notes from facebook to regular comments in wordpress.

  21. Hi James, I have WP 2.6, I have been looking for this plugin for ages. I have a ton of comments I want to sychronize.

    It doesn’t bring them into he blog, it just says manually importing comments.

    is there something else i need to change. My posts are imported to facebook via a feedburner feed

  22. So I dropped Wordbook and tried importing only with RSS to see if that might have anything to do with it. I got no response. I get the ‘manually importing comments…’ message and nothing else. Might it be that my WordPress and FB account emails are different? Or does it just hate me like it seems?

    I love the idea of this plugin. I found it when I went looking for something to do exactly this. I’d be thrilled if I could get it working.

  23. I reinstalled the plugin, messed with my feeds, all kinds of stuff. Suddenly, it worked. I have no idea why, but I’m thrilled. I love this plugin.

  24. I am afraid that the problem mentioned above turns up here as well. I am a first time user and the manually importing… notice doesn’t do more than just appearing. I am using the latest WP version, the latest version of your plugin, together with Feedburner. I’d be thrilled if the brilliant idea would be put into practice on my own site : )

  25. I’m having the same problem as Justin and Rin. Using Feedburner and WordPress 2.6.3

    First mistake was using http://www.facebook.com instead of network.facebook.com where network is the network you belong to. Now it lists my blog posts, “Checking for comments on Checking for comments on” but doesn’t seem to import any comments.

    Help please!

  26. Started looking at it, I have a dumb regular expression that just won’t work, but its getting there. Facebook changed a lot this time!

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