How to migrate Facebook comments from using "URL" property to "HREF"

Question

Would really appreciate any input that anyone has into an issue I'm having with the Facebook Comments plugin system.

Essentially, We have created a Wordpress theme which was launched last year and used the old legacy FMBL to integrate facebook comments. The code to pull in comments was something like:

<div id="fb-root" style="padding-top:8px;">
</div>
<script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#appId=<?php
          echo $facebookappid; ?>&amp;xfbml=1"></script>
<fb:comments
    URL="<?php the_permalink() ?>"
    xid="<?php echo $post->ID; ?>"
    publish_feed="true"
    migrated="1"
    reverse="false"
    numposts="20"
    width="620">
</fb:comments>

Now the problem is that we are getting errors on some of our sites saying the following:

--

Warning: this comments plugin is operating in compatibility mode, but has no posts yet. Consider specifying an explicit 'href' as suggested in the comments plugin documentation to take advantage of all plugin features.

--

I have tried changing the URL value to HREF which fixes the issue but also removes all the previous facebook comments on the site. It seems that with the old system they were not effectively posted to Facebook.

Does anyone know of a way we could migrate comments from the old to the new system (the migrate function does not work in this case).

Answer 1

There in lies the problem. Facebook provided the migrate function when it transitioned from the first incarnation of the comment plugin to the second, and now it's completely eliminated in the third. The problem however is that the comments made while using the "migrate=1" option in the second version, are lost when you switch to the new version (to get rid of the warning).

Integration into blogs/cms etc are now losing comments if they hadn't switched over to the href rag in the second incarnation, which a lot didn't since they didn't want to lose the original comments from the fist round of using the plugin.

Does anyone have a working query to pull comments via XID from the old code? At least then we can include it as an add-in below the new comment plugin to add any old comments at the bottom.

Edit: So I recall when the first plugin came out, there was a comment manager tool on the forums that Gil had made. The forums are still (mostly) accessible, so I took a look through and he had removed it. I recall there was a way that it pulled all your commments via XID in a loop if I recall.

I'm gonna try to dig up/mock up a remake of that where we can at least have something pulling the comments so we can reference them. I think it all depends on how the XID was stored. I recall storing my href (before the href was an option) as the XID because I knew it was unique. However now when I attempt to do a lookup via the comments.get test tool it gives an error about the XID formatting, so I'm afraid they may have actually mashed/cleansed it of old http:// data.

Frustrating to say the least, but not the only time something has changed without warning or any real thought process behind it.

Answer 2

There are no workarounds for now. You have 2 choices: if you add new href or old xid params with migrated=1 you'll will lose all previous comments and you'll get away the error. Or you'll stay with your old version comment box, with thousands of old comments and yellow error box below... Welcome to Facebook world guys... after 6 months they may correct it... nothing third party hand can do here... :(