Social media cards and Facebook events issue
This post was co-authored by @JayDev .
What is happening
If you are using the Social media card on ArcGIS Hub or Enterprise Sites, you may have noticed an unexpected result with the Facebook Events feed. Hub and Enterprise Sites use Facebook’s Page Plugin to power their Social media cards. Over the past year, Facebook Events are not being shown under the 'Events' tab of the Page Plugin.
Facebook initially acknowledged and assigned this bug, but they recently closed the issue without fixing the problem. As the Social media card relies on Facebook’s plugin to work properly, this outage has impacted Hub and Enterprise Sites. As such, the Hub team cannot resolve the underlying issue and suggests that users turn off the Event feed.
Below, you can learn more about the situation, what actions have been taken, and what you can do to keep your sites running smoothly.
How it works
Within Sites and Pages, users can embed a Facebook Page via the Social media card. One option on that card is to display a feed of Facebook Events associated with that Facebook Page. This was turned off by default, but if you had associated Events to your Facebook Page within Facebook, you may have also activated the 'Events' feed in Hub or Enterprise Sites.
In a Social media card, let’s say you add a 'Post or Timeline Link' such as https://www.facebook.com/esrigis/. With 'Events' turned on, the ‘Events' tab should display either a list of events or a message: "Esri does not have any upcoming events." Due to the bug, the user sees only a blank page with no events listed and without any message about upcoming events. You can still turn on or off the 'Events' tab in the site layout editor, but the events feed is always empty.
Hub team action
This outage was reported to Facebook last year by a Facebook user and confirmed by many other users (link to the reported bug, requires FB account: https://developers.facebook.com/support/bugs/314594194066745/?join_id=f350988af492978) . In the meantime, the Hub development team has been eagerly awaiting a constructive response or solution. In spite of indications that the issue would be fixed, the bug was recently closed without resolution. Since then, Facebook has not directly commented on the likelihood of a fix.
What action you can take
In the short term, the Hub team suggests that you switch off this functionality for Social media cards that embed Facebook pages. Simply turn off the 'Events' feed while editing your Social media cards in the site layout editor (within the Customize side panel).
Beyond this, if this functionality is important to you, Facebook is directing users to share feedback via it's community forum: https://developers.facebook.com/community/. In the meantime, Hub Premium users can leverage Hub Events to inform members of their community about upcoming meetings or activities. Please share this post with others who manage Hub and Enterprise Sites. Finally, keep an eye on this blog post! If anything changes, we'll be sure to let you know.