Attempted Frozen Title Change: Any FB developers?

Question

This has been asked a few times over the past couple of years but as Facebook tells me "Facebook engineers actively participate on StackOverflow.." So I'm hoping get get some joy here.

We have uploaded a video to youtube, passed it round and made sure we are happy with it, made it public and tried to change the title from 'xxx - final' to the actual title. However, Facebook shares are showing the old prerelease title but not the actual title, leading to much confusion amongst our subscribers and those trying to share the video. I should add the time between clicking the 'public' button to updating the title was a matter of minutes and seconds.

I have run it through the Facebook debugger and the scraper can see the changes but the problem persists along with the following debugger message:

"Attempted Frozen Title Change It appears that you are trying to change the property og:title from xxx to xxx. If so, you are not allowed to for this object because too many actions have been published against it."

This is obviously a real problem for us. Has anyone come up with a definitive solution or course of action? We can't simply delete the video because its for a band and there have been numerous post to not only Facebook but fan forums and elsewhere already and deleting and re-uploading the video would require an alternative url.

Many thanks

Answer 1

I managed to talk to a FB developer about this. Is seems that its a protective measure to stop click baiting, fake links and so on. His advice was make sure you upload the file as you want to see it when it goes live - ie. Don't use 'video 4.. final version' or some similar 'temporary' title because as soon as people start to view click or comment it becomes locked.

The engineer I spoke to was kind enough to unfreeze the video so all was well in the end, but looking at the comments of others who have had the same problem I was pretty lucky as it was a long standing Youtube account with 100,000's views and hundreds of links pointing to it meaning they were comfortable that I wasn't 'trying it on'.

So the bottom line is: if you want to upload a video and share it with your Facebook account, make sure the you have set the titles, tags and any metadata on the video immediately and before you paste to, or, share on youtube or there is a strong possibility that even though you can update that info on Youtube, Facebook won't recognise the changes and instead use the information it has in its database when the video was first scraped.