Fixing This Content Is No Longer Available WordPress Facebook Sharing Error

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Fixing This Content Is No Longer Available WordPress Facebook Sharing Error

Tim
May 21, 2016

Fixing This Content Is No Longer Available Error

Mike from Unique Moments photography contacted me to ask if I could fix a small problem with his WordPress Blog, running the Infinity Grid theme on Good Gallery – though this idea applies to any content shared to Facebook from any platform. Whenever he tried to share a blog post to Facebook he was getting an error – “this content is no longer available”. We solved this for Mike – read on for how we did it, and how you can solve the same problem yourself.

The error message Mike was getting when sharing a blog post to Facebook was

This content is no longer available
The content you requested cannot be displayed right now. It may be temporarily unavailable, the link you clicked on may have expired, or you may not have permission to view this page

There are two common causes for this problem.

  • The Facebook cache of the page has some kind of problem, such as an http status code that it doesn’t like, that prevents sharing. The solution can be as simple as using the  Facebook debugging console and hitting “refresh”.
  • The Facebook App ID (fb:app_id) may be invalid. The Facebook debugging console can confirm this. However Facebook should use a default sharing ID, so this shouldn’t prevent sharing, but in practice is sometimes seem to.

In Mike’s case a refresh of the blog posts didn’t help, replacing the App ID in the blog theme seemed to do the job. On most blogs means simply editing the header.php file to replace the App ID, but on Good Good their extensive security precautions prevent altering files. Instead I solved the problem by:

  • Downloading the latest release of the theme of theme from Theme Forest
  • Creating a new “app” for Mike’s website in the Facebook developer console, including getting the ID and publishing the app
  • Decompress the theme, open header.php and change the fb:app_id line to my new app ID, and save it
  • Compress the files up to create a new version of the theme
  • Back up the blog, including backing up the Infinity Grid settings
  • Remove the existing theme, and upload my new version in its place, and activating the theme

After this I went to the Facebook debugging console and refreshed the information for the latest blog posts, hit “share to facebook”, and it shared successfully!

If anyone needs something similar done please contact us for help.

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