Publicize: Posts shared to Facebook don't display complete post previews with featured images

[pauljacobson]

Quick summary

There are a number of reports of posts being shared to Facebook using the Publicize feature and the post previews don't display featured images. This has proven difficult to troubleshoot as Facebook's Debug tool frequently seems to crash when we add a post link to debug.

Our team has tried various steps, including the following:

– Reconnecting FB – verified that the image had the size and weight needed to be a FB thumbnail – setting site private and public again – changing primary domain

Steps to reproduce

1. Share a published post to Facebook using the automatic publication option from Publicize.
2. Observe that the post preview on Facebook doesn't display correctly.

What you expected to happen

Post previews should render in Facebook with the correct post details and featured image.

What actually happened

Post previews on Facebook don't display the featured image consistently. There are also reports of how the post attribution is incorrect.

Context

We have a number of reports here: p2EDhh-1HI-p2

Here are some reports:

• 5527712-zen
• 5570420-zen

Platform (Simple, Atomic, or both?)

No response

Theme-specific issue?

This doesn't seem to be specific to a theme.

Browser, operating system and other notes

No response

Reproducibility

Intermittent

Severity

Most (> 50%)

Available workarounds?

Yes, difficult to implement

Workaround details

If we can load the Facebook Debug tool, and run it successfully, it seems to help resolve the issue for specific posts in some cases.

One customer reported that adding an image description below the image helped.

[github-actions[bot]]

Support References

This comment is automatically generated. Please do not edit it.

• [ ] 5527712-zen
• [ ] 5570420-zen
• [ ] 6091808-zen

[jamiepalatnik]

📌 SCRUBBING : RESULT

• Tested on Simple - Could Not Replicate
• Tested on AT - Could Not Replicate
• Tested on Self-hosted - Could Not Replicate
• Replicable on Core - No

📌 FINDINGS/SCREENSHOTS/VIDEO

• I was not able to replicate this on any of my test sites.
• I tested sharing a post to Facebook by using Publicize and by pasting a link from my test site in a new Facebook post.
• I was able to replicate with a link from one of the sites from the linked user reports.

📌 ACTIONS

• Await author feedback

📌 Message to Author

• @pauljacobson I wasn't able to replicate this, but I understand there are multiple user reports so I think it would be good to investigate further. With your steps to reproduce, can you please clarify if you were able to reproduce this issue yourself on a test site, or if these steps are only describing the experience of the affected users? Thanks!

[cuemarie]

📌 ACTIONS

• pinged author

[pauljacobson]

Hi @cuemarie and @jamiepalatnik

My steps only describe what affected users reported. I haven't been able to consistently reproduce the issue on my side although we've had enough reports to indicate that there is/was an issue of some sort.

[vajrasar]

Note: Please check p2EDhh-1HI-p2 for investigations done so far.

[allilevine]

Next steps from @jeherve:

• ensure the OG tags are correct
• check the site's access logs when Facebook's bot comes around to see if the bot runs into any issues fetching the image when it comes

More context: p1675098210880529/1675097429.603779-slack-C03FE3T479R

@Automattic/jetpack-reach Is this issue a better fit for your team than Dotcom? 🙂

[pablinos]

Probably, yes! This could be related to this issue Automattic/jpop-issues#8021

I've got a theory about it being related to Site Accelerator/Photon, and that maybe we should remove that from the OG image tags.

[syhussaini]

I ran into this ticket 6091808-zen and performed a few tests on my test site with the same theme and Plan — the previews load fine.

When I tested the user's site, I am still not seeing the image previews.

[jeherve]

@syhussaini Your ticket is quite different, as it's about sharing posts, not Publicize.

It also highlights an interesting error on that specific site: Facebook's bot, when crawling the site, seems to see a canonical URL using HTTP instead of HTTPS. This is expected on WordPress.com, for the reasons outlined in p5j4vm-uG-p2 It is consequently a red herring here; as you mentioned, things work on other sites so this shouldn't really be an issue.

Querying the image directly using Facebook's debug tools gives us the real reason for the problem:

I would consequently recommend that the site owner contact Facebook directly about this, using the URL that appears in the Debugger when searching for one of the images on their site.

[mriyazuddin]

I have let the user know to contact Facebook about this issue.

[allilevine]

@pablinos @jeherve Should we close this issue for now, or is it still something we want to investigate?

[pablinos]

There is another issue 1202411927350212-as-1204318364966623/f which could be the cause of this, where we suspect it's because the Facebook cache hasn't been primed with the image. We could use this issue to track work on that maybe? Or close this and open a separate issue on Jetpack.

[allilevine]

We could use this issue to track work on that maybe?

Sounds good! Let's also keep it open to track any future related reports.

[mrfoxtalbot]

The post you referenced (p2EDhh-1HI-p2) has been marked as resolved @pauljacobson. Can we close this issue? Can you still reproduce it? Thank you!

[pauljacobson]

The post you referenced (p2EDhh-1HI-p2) has been marked as resolved @pauljacobson. Can we close this issue? Can you still reproduce it? Thank you!

Thanks for the ping. I tested one of the links that our customer reported - https://uduingel.com/2022/09/06/vota-vastu-joud-muuta-ise-oma-elu/

This link still doesn't load a featured image and the canonical URL is http and not https.