When the sharing on a post to Facebook is broken

The first time a URL is shared on Facebook they send a bot to visit the URL and check the post metadata which is embedded in the code. The metadata it needs are things like the URL of the Featured Image, the title, the excerpt and the author's name. This data is always available on Global Voices posts, if the post is visible, the data is in the source code.

When Facebook finds this data it saves a copy (cache) and holds on to it forever. This is theoretically good, because when new people share the URL it can happen faster, but there's a problem: If the bot can't load the post, it saves empty data and never updates it!

The effect is that any error with the page during that first share will make the post broken forever unless you manually reset the cache with the Facebook Sharing Debugger tool. 

• Visit Facebook Sharing Debugger
• Paste in the URL of the post
• Click Debug to load the post info
• Click Scrape Again to have it rescan the URL
• Check that all the data is right and the image is showing.

Final Thought: Always test Facebook sharing after publishing a post!