S J Birkill
MV Administrator
just a sensible reserve
Posts: 848
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Posting MV links to Facebook
« : 03.10.22 at 22:38 » |
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As MV members, we frequently need to place ('share') a link to MV in a Facebook post. The process works fine when it's a general 'plug' and you use the normal MV address as a link: https://www.peteatkin.com/forum will do the trick, or https://www.peteatkin.com/short.htm if you want to show them the 'short' (the more friendly, message index only) version.
But if you need to reference a specific MV thread or post, there's a problem. For its own inscrutable reasons, Facebook does not like the typical forum post address. It may be 'too long' (too many characters), or it may contain too many of the 'wrong' kind of query-string separator (';' rather than '&'). In either case it will truncate the link, leaving the URL incomplete and delivering the wrong page to the hapless reader.
Until recently our recommended work-around was to use a free URL-shortening service such as bit.ly, but this was just too fiddly for the casual user, so it wasn't often done. And more recently Facebook has become suspicious of such links, to the extent where some messages containing them have been blocked as suspected spam.
So... we needed a better way. I've today made some changes to avoid both of these problems. I've discarded the old 'SHARE' icon with its pop-up links to all kinds of social thingies (not really very useful, I thought), and replaced it with a new feature.
Read any post on MV (including this one) and you'll now see at the bottom right of its text panel a green button labelled "COPY". Every post has one. Click the button (it turns red) and the unique address of that post -- formulated so that Facebook won't do anything silly with it -- will be instantly copied to your device's Clipboard.
Then, when composing your MV-referencing message in Facebook, all you need do is paste (<CTRL-V>, or <Command-V> on Mac) that same Clipboard address into your message, and Facebook will create its own link pointing to precisely the right page on MV.
So, Facebook-using members, you're now better armed, with just a click and a keystroke, to direct your fellow-Facebookers to some of the richer, more in-depth content you and Pete's other faithful followers are posting here in Midnight Voices.
Steve
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