Want custom title image description in facebook share link from a flash app

Question

Possible Duplicate    How does Facebook Sharer select Images        I am making a flash app that demonstrates potensial traffic injuries when driving at different speeds  I want the user to be able to share this information on facebook  However this demands that i can customize the text that will appear on facebook in some manner   I am making an url that is opened in a blank window  from the flash app itself   I specify the u and t parameters  putting the generated message as the t parameter  But this seems to always be overridden by the pages title  If i omit the title tag from the html code  the file name is used  also overriding the specified title     http   www facebook com sharer php u http   espentokerud com face addiste html t test    I also tried url-encoding the url  but to no avail    http   www facebook com sharer php u http 3a 2f 2fespentokerud com 2fface 2faddiste html t test    I also tried using the addthis API  but experience the same shortcomings  The funny thing is that if i post a swf  the title and description can be customized  and it is also possible to specify a screenshot  But if i dont post a swf  this seems to be ignored   I am aware that I can use meta tags on the html page to specify the thumbnail image  title and description  but some of this content has to be based on calculations inside the flash app

User · Answer

You can t  it just doesn t support it   I have to ask  why those calculations need to happen Only inside the flash app   You have to be navigating to an URL that clearly relates to the metadata you get from the flash app  Otherwise how would the flash app know to get the values depending on the URL you hit   Options are    calculate on the page  When serving the page you need to do those same calculations on the server and send the title  etc on the page metadata   send metadata in the query string to your site  If you really must keep the calculation off the server  an alternative trick would be to explicitly set the metadata in the URL the users click to get to your site from Facebook  When processing the page  you just copy it back in the metadata sections  don t forget to encode appropriately   That is clearly limited because of the url size restrictions  send the calculation results in the query string to your site  if those calculations just give you a couple numbers that are used in the metadata  you could include just that in the query string of the URL the users click back to your site  That s more likely to not give you problems with URL sizes      re      Why is this upvoted  It s wrong  You CAN - it IS supported to add custom title  description and images to your share  I do it all the time      Dustin Fineout 3 hours ago   The OP very clearly stated that he already knew you could serve that from a page  but wanted to pass the values directly to facebook  not through the target page     Besides  note that I gave 3 different options to work around the issue  one of which is what you posted as an answer later  Your option isn t how the OP was trying to do it  its just a workaround because of facebook restrictions    Finally  just as I did  you should mention that particular solution is flawed because you can easily hit the URL size restriction

User · Answer

I have a Joomla Module that displays stuff    and I want to be able to share that stuff on facebook and not the Page s Title Meta Description    so my workaround is to have a secret  php file on the server that gets executed when it detects the FB s     SERVER  HTTP USER AGENT    if   SERVER  HTTP USER AGENT       facebookexternalhit 1 1   http   www facebook com externalhit uatext php          echo  Direct Access     else       echo  FB Accessed       and pass variables with the URL that formats that particular page with the title and meta desciption of the item I want to share from my joomla module     a name  fb share  share url  MYURL sharer php title TITLE amp desc DESC   hope this helps

User · Answer

I think this site has the solution  i will test it now   It Seems like facebook has changed the parameters of share php so  in order to customize share window text and images you have to put parameters in a  p  array   http   www daddydesign com wordpress how-to-create-a-custom-facebook-share-button-for-your-iframe-tab   Check it out

User · Answer

2016 Update  Use the Sharing Debugger to figure out what your problems are   Make sure you re following the Facebook Sharing Best Practices   Make sure you re using the Open Graph Markup correctly    Original Answer  I agree with what has already been said here  but per documentation on the Facebook developer site  you might want to use the following meta tags    lt meta property  og title  content  title    gt   lt meta property  og description  content  description    gt   lt meta property  og image  content  thumbnail image    gt    If you are not able to accomplish your goal with meta tags and you need a URL embedded version  see  Lelis718 s answer below

User · Answer

I had this same problem a week ago    First of all I noticed your URL has an ampersand preceding the parameter string  but it probably needs to have a question mark instead to begin the parameter string  followed by an ampersand between each additional parameter   Now  you do need to escape your URL but also double-escape the URL parameters  title or other content you need to provide content in the Share  you are passing to the URL  as follows   var myParams    t     escape  Some title here        amp id     escape  some content ID or any other value I want to load    var fooBar    http   www facebook com share php u     escape  http   foobar com superDuperSharingPage php     myParams     Now  you need to create the above-linked superDuperSharingPage php  which should provide the dynamic title  description  and image content you desire  Something like this should suffice    lt  php        get our URL query parameters      title     GET  t         id     GET  id           maybe we want to load some content with the id I ll pretend we loaded a        description from some database in the sky which is magically arranged thusly       desciption    databaseInTheSky  id   description      gt   lt  DOCTYPE html PUBLIC  -  W3C  DTD XHTML 1 0 Strict  EN   http   www w3 org TR xhtml1 DTD xhtml1-strict dtd  gt   lt html xmlns  http   www w3 org 1999 xhtml  gt   lt head gt     lt title gt  lt  php echo  title   gt  lt  title gt     lt meta http-equiv  content-type  content  text html  charset utf-8    gt     lt meta name  title  content   lt  php echo  title   gt     gt     lt meta name  description  content   lt  php echo  desciption   gt     gt     lt  -- the following line redirects to wherever we want the USER to land -- gt     lt  -- Facebook won t follow it  you may or may not actually want    need this  -- gt     lt meta http-equiv  refresh  content  1 URL http   foobar com    gt   lt  head gt   lt body gt     lt p gt  lt  php echo  desciption   gt  lt  p gt     lt p gt  lt img src  image a  lt  php echo  id   gt  jpg  alt  Alt tags are always a good idea     gt  lt  p gt     lt p gt  lt img src  image b  lt  php echo  id   gt  jpg  alt  Make the web more accessible to the blind     gt  lt  p gt   lt  body gt   lt  html gt    Let me know if this works for you  it s essentially what did for me

User · Answer

I actually have a similar problem  I have a page with multiple radio buttons  each button will set the title and description meta tags of the page  via JavaScript upon change   For example  if users select the first button  the meta tags will say    lt meta name  title  content  First Title  gt   lt meta name  description  content  First Description  gt    If the user select the second button  this changes the meta tags to    lt meta name  title  content  Second Title  gt   lt meta name  description  content  Second Description  gt        and so on  I have confirmed that the code is working fine via Firebug  i e  I can see that those two tags were properly changed    Apparently  Facebook Share only pulls in the title and description meta tags that are available upon page load  The changes to those two tags post page load are completely ignored   Does anybody have any ideas on how to solve this  That is  to force Facebook to get the latest values that are change after the page loads

[flash] Want custom title / image / description in facebook share link from a flash app

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