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When I share a link to my proposal it grabs the wrong "text" to share in the description box.

Recommend that Area 51 use the Facebook Open Graph tags og:description or at least the <meta> description.

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  • 2
    Which proposal are you trying to share (to verify the problem)?
    – Robert Cartaino
    Dec 13 '11 at 21:16
  • @RobertCartaino: Please see my answer, it seems all posts are affected.
    – Ambo100
    Jan 15 '12 at 16:35
  • I've updated my answer
    – Ambo100
    Feb 23 '12 at 11:43
2

This is fixed now.

Facebook seemed to selecting content from the bottom of the page, despite its claim that

if you don't tag your page, Facebook Share will grab the title of your page as specified in the tag, and will create a summary description from the first text that appears in the body of your page

Google+, by contrast, was nicely using the proposal description as the summary text.

Nevertheless, we've added Open Graph meta tags to proposal pages, so Facebook should use the proposal's title & description now.

Note that Facebook caches on their end, so to verify the fix right now, you may need to add a cache breaker e.g.

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/27488/autism?foo=bar

0

I tried sharing a link to a proposal using the built-in share button to Facebook:

share-proposal

Just to make sure this wasn't an isolated case, I also tried sharing links to three other proposals in the definition stage and every description was exactly the same.

Update: 23rd February 2012

Good news! The share description has disappeared.

share-proposal-2

I think it would be better if the share description matched the description for the proposal, in this case:

Proposed Q&A site for parents that struggle every day with their autistic children. Being able to discuss techniques to handle the every-day struggle of an autistic child can change a person's life if handled correctly.

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