Facebook Pages

[Daniel Hood]

How many of you with a XenForo powered community owners have facebook pages related to your community?

Just wondering, for no particular reason...
*just kidding, there's a very particular reason.

 

[m1ne]

Yes, right here. Why'd you ask?

 

[Daniel Hood]

Brainstorming.

 

[FredC]

I thought everyone did... lol..
Every forum I build gets a FB Page.

 

[Fred.]

I have, same here.
Every forum I build gets a FB, Twitter and Google+ Page.

 

[HWS]

Just fb and twitter.

Managed with hootsuite.com. Very recommendable!

 

[TPerry]

How many of you with a XenForo powered community owners have facebook pages related to your community?

Nope, I don't have one at all, nor two, nor three.
In fact, I've never heard of this Facebook.. what is it.

 

[Creaky]

I have one for each site I have

 

[IPF]

I have one for my forum.

 

[Lisa]

Brainstorming.

Tell me you're brainstorming some kind of integration for FB Pages and forums

 

[Daniel Hood]

Nailed it. It involves callbacks though because I'd have to handle it from a central server due to how Facebook's pages api works. To make it installable on each forum independent from my server would require each site that uses it to have an ssl, each site to manually submit the application to Facebook and wait the 5-7 days for approval, etc...

Basically the features I'm thinking of are:

• Any time that an image is added to the page it's either added to a new thread, an existing thread, or as a XenForo Media Gallery media item.
• Any time a new post or a link is shared on the page, it's automatically posted to a new thread or an existing thread.
• Every time there's a comment on a post/image on the page it'd be added as a post on the corresponding thread/media item.
  • These posts would have to be guest posts with the name as the facebook profile name,
  • There'd then be a way to link that guest name (based on facebook id) to a user account on XenForo so all posts by that facebook id show up as the user instead -- no user account would remain a guest post.
  • Guest posts should probably go into the moderation queue by default.

The downside is that it's reliant on my server. Therefore, I'd likely require a monthly recurring fee.

 

[Lisa]

Sounds pretty neat. Shame you couldn't offer both options, which would open the addon up to those people who do have SSL and don't mind doing the application and waiting, while offering the hosted version for those people who would prefer not to.

 

[Daniel Hood]

It's possible. It's just duplicating the work because I would also have to make it so you can connect your facebook (additional permissions are needed) and you have to then activate it via your admin panel. I already have those steps done outside of XenForo for another project. To keep it on a centralized server and enable other people to use it I just have to make the callback file which handles all the actions.

It's not something likely to happen soon, I have way too much work to do. I just have this habit of when I do things outside of XenForo, I try to think of ways everyone here can benefit from them. Pretty much how ElasticSearch Essentials and my chrome extension came about. For now, it's just thinking and seeing who would even care about such an add-on.

 

[Fred.]

I like the idea of pulling stuff in from Facebook
But I don't like to be dependent on someone else his server.

 

[kaieivindm]

I like the idea of pulling stuff in from Facebook
But I don't like to be dependent on someone else his server.

Same, like the idea. But not to be dependent on 3rd party server. Won't do it.

 

[Daniel Hood]

I like the idea of pulling stuff in from Facebook
But I don't like to be dependent on someone else his server.

Yeah... figured that's how everyone was going to feel.

 

[Ernest L. Defoe]

I have no problem dealing with a 3rd Party server but would rather have it on my own so I don't have to worry about if the 3rd Party server going down and something not working. I doubt that would be an issue but rather be safe than sorry.

 

[Wildcat Media]

In fact, I've never heard of this Facebook.. what is it.

I wish I'd never heard of it, personally. But, what can ya do, eh?

I like the idea of pulling stuff in from Facebook

I use WordPress to push to social media, but other than displaying our twitter feed, I don't pull in any data. On any fb page, for instance, I have user posting turned off, and clearly state the page is unmonitored, so we have nothing to pull in. (I do have someone checking for bad comments, but that is about it. We do not engage in comments.) WordPress finally has a good plugin for pushing out to fb pages, G+ pages, Twitter, Tumblr and LinkedIn--it's part of Jetpack. It has proven to be very reliable. The way I have ours set up, there are three (soon to be more) satellite sites on WordPress which all use XenForo for the discussions. I'm trying out one of the WP/XF bridges (not XenWord as we never got it working across domains), and am still not happy with the way it works...but at least it is something for now.

I can see how some admins and site owners out there could make use of fetching social media content and pulling it in.