Facebook Apps Getting Stuck in Directory Approval Process
Mark Hendrickson
21 comments »
An application developer contacted us late last week to inform us of a common problem he’s seen with the Facebook platform since October 29th wherein some developers’ applications are getting perpetually stuck in the directory approval process.
It appears two things have been happening to prevent applications from appearing in the directory: they are approved but then soon revert back to “pending” status, or they are simply never approved. According to a ticket (#589) created in Facebook’s bug tracking system, at least a couple dozen developers have been experiencing this problem. Many more probably have been waiting for their applications to be approved but have concluded that the process just takes an inordinate amount of time.
If you are a developer who has been waiting forever to see your application listed in the directory, or have seen your application disappear from the directory, then you may want to point your experience out to Facebook. The company appears to have been very good at responding to developers’ concerns on a case-by-case basis.
A couple months ago I wrote about how Facebook applications were (obviously) pointless if they didn’t work. While I suggested that scalability issues were at fault for broken apps, many responded in the comments by suggesting that technical problems with the Facebook platform were actually at fault for many, if not most, of the error screens I was seeing at the time. This recent issue with directory approval indicates that Facebook is still working to make its platform simply work for developers. Developers may or may not still be seeing their applications broken by the platform, but if they can’t get them listed in the directory, that is even worse.
If you have developed for the Facebook platform, please share your overall experience in the comments so that others who are thinking about developing for Facebook know what to expect. I have an inquiry into Facebook about this current bug and will publish any information I receive back from as an update to this post.
Thanks Dani for the tip.
I’m a Facebook developer and have over 7 apps in the directory. My most recent was approved Friday, after 18 hours of “pending”.
Hey Mark,
Our students have been having this same issue, but I’ve heard from a few teams that they were listed within an hour of posting a comment on the Bugzilla thread (the one you already linked to).
http://bugs.developers.faceboo.....cgi?id=589
Dan
http://www.dan.ag
We shouldn’t be surprised. There system is so application heavy that there is bound to be leaks.
Just in the past week, I’ve experienced two fairly significant issues with the FB platform (these have also been noted by many other app devs in the FB dev forum, which FB employees don’t seem to read):
(1) For several days last week, many Javascript and mock-AJAX calls simply did not work (AJAX calls returned “onerror”). Because app devs rely on Facebook to parse and execute FBML/FBJS, there was nothing we could do but wait for the FB engineers to fix it. Gotta love those proprietary systems!
(2) Yesterday, many API calls were horrendously slow (many app pages would simply time out). Again, nothing app devs could do about it.
For all its glory, the FB platform still has more than its fair share of problems.
this is a good policy, whoever joins with Microsoft you will start finding issue with that and the reverse for Google…carry on guys…good job…
Yeah. Thanks Dani for point out another useless Facebook topic for the TechCrunch editors to post on.
Thanks TechCrunch for shedding light on this incredibly important aspect of Facebook. You complete me TechCrunch. …You complete me.
I have been developing Facebook apps since the platform launched, and it pains me to say that the platform is very unstable. Facebook pushes new changes weekly, and they almost inevitably introduce a range of bugs with each push. App developers have become all too familiar with the “White Screen Of Death” error messages.
Unfortunately, I think this is going to become the new standard for web development. “Broken” is the new “stable”. Everything will be in perpetual beta. The pace of development is so fast, and the pressure to release new features is so great, that nothing that can really be fully tested before being pushed live. I don’t really blame Facebook — they’re doing their best with the new realities of the world they created.
For us developers, this new reality means countless hours wasted trying to figure out where the bugs in our code live, only to get a message from Facebook two days later that, “oops, looks like we broke mock AJAX with our last push. Sorry!”
One of the apps I developed got blocked for spamming when it only had 35 users (all employees of the company who hired me to build it). It took Facebook two weeks to get back to me, only to tell me the problem was on my end, not theirs. I went through the code, ripped out everything that could be remotely construed as spam, and unblocked the app. It was blocked again within 3 hours.
Two more weeks, multiple bug reports, and dozens of emails and forum posts later, Facebook finally admitted “there’s something wonky” with their spaminess system. Of course, at that point, my app was effectively dead. It had been blocked for weeks, and any momentum it had was gone.
The frustrating part is that it was the first app of its kind, and should have done very well. Three weeks later, some clones started popping up, and the top three of them each had upwards of 500k users. And all I could do is sit back and sigh. Not fun.
@5
My experiences of the directory have actually been very positive; my first and only application (my travel photo map) was added to the directory within 72 hours of submission.
This is slightly off topic, but I’ve been having the same problem with flyers getting approved as well. They’re just sitting there active but not getting any impressions, no matter how high I increase my daily budget or CPC. Whats up with Facebook? I’m very frustrated with them.
what a boring and useless post. like this problem is hard to fix.
Just lauched our website and facebook app today. I submitted the facebook app 2-3 days ago and now its approved and listed in the directory. Overall it was faster than I expected.
I also created an Ad but have 2 Impressions for 3 days. Not sure what their deal is with the advertising platform.
Unfortunately - Facebook is probably taking customer service tips from Microsoft…you have chosen unwisely my son…..
It would be great if Facebook could work on stability issues like this one: http://bugs.developers.faceboo.....cgi?id=622
We have developed apps for many clients. We just had one submitted last week and it was live in the directory after submission in under 36 hours without a problem.
On the flip side we also saw a different application that was submitted a few days earlier that was in the directory, then out, then in, then out, then in.
I strongly suspect that this has to do with them rolling out a new parser then rolling back to and older version as they tried to fix a bug or two.
See this from the facebook developers platform status: http://www.facebook.com/develo.....php?id=111
This is just a sign of the platform going through some improvements, revisions and growing pains. We live in a constant state of beta when developing for facebook. This is just the way it is as the platform continues to improve and evolve…
Cheers!
Rodney Rumford
Publisher: FaceReviews.com
Mark,
We have been fairly happy with the response from facebook other than a few times when the Mock-AJAX has been slow or non-functional.
But most recently we faced an interesting problem that we never thought of. One of our applications “Chocolate Fantasy” with 500,000+ Users and fairly significant daily activity disappeared one day.
See…
http://bugs.developers.faceboo.....cgi?id=653
After we filed the bug (which to our dismay was assigned P5 priority), the facebook engineers were to quick to respond that the application was deleted. But we still do not know how did this happen..
- Was it done from a developer account ( some account could have been hacked, and we’d want to take safeguard action ).
- Did it happen from facebook’s end.
and even more importantly how can we restore the application with all its users.
I understand that facebook engineers are busy but this case points to an important concern for the developer community
a) Safeguards against deleting applications. As of now it seems a super easy thing to delete an application.
b) Process to bring up deleted applications quickly possibly with help from application developers.
I created my first facebook app 2 days ago and found the guides and support very useful.
My app is very simple, but I set the whole thing up in around 2 hours.
It is called Christmas List and enables a user to detail things they would like for Christmas which are then linked to my own shopping comparison web site.
The developers page is clear and the examples provided show how easy it is to create an app.
Within about 30 mins I knew how to 1) write info to a users profile 2) connect to one of my own databases 3) Grab facebook user information.
One thing I did not find so easy was adding an ‘invite’ page to the app, however there was a tutorial in the wiki.
The whole experience was enjoyable and I intend to produce some much more interesting/complex facebook apps in the future.
Jon
I submitted an app a couple of days ago (Zoobos Widget) and still haven’t heard anything from the approval dept. I guess I would have to wait and see