Facebook Sharing does not support SMF URL structure

[endomorph]

When sharing a forum link on facebook, if the URL contains a semi colon, Facebook will default the link back to the domain root.

I have raised a support case with Facebook to try and get this fixed and am awaiting their further reply.

The response so far was -

Sorry, semicolons are reserved characters as specified in the RFC 1738
(http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt).

to which I replied -

The semi-colon is a legal URI character; it belongs to the sub-delimiter
category: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt

However, the specification states that whether the semi-color is legitimate for
a specific URI or not depends on the scheme or producer of that URI. So, if
site using those links doesn't allow semi-colons, then they're not valid for
that particular case.

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt covers URLs and what characters may appear
in unencoded form. Given that URLs containing semicolons work properly in
browsers, your code should support them.

and their answer was

Thanks for the report. We are looking into this.

[vbgamer45]

Thanks for reporting that to Facebook hopefully they will get it fixed on their side.

[Joshua Dickerson]

Any resolution to this? Perhaps we could send an email from a Simple Machines address requesting they fix the issue.

[endomorph]

Check bug reporting, no.

Maybe an email from you guys could help

[Matthew K.]

That'd probably help groundup. It'd be nice to have resolved

[endomorph]

Driving me up the wall as I cant effectively use the share feature on many parts of my site

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Out of curiosity, what link would you need to share with a semicolon in it?
Post, topic or boardlinks don't have semicolons in them, so basically sharing works just fine.

[Arantor]

Out of curiosity, what link would you need to share with a semicolon in it?
Post, topic or boardlinks don't have semicolons in them, so basically sharing works just fine.

Unless you're hitting a page you've been to previously, like this one turned up for me as http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=412643.msg2946244;topicseen

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Well, that's true, but sharing links directly to posts or topics work, and all the mods I know that are used for this use links without the semicolons.

[Arantor]

All the sharing mods might, but I get the feeling we're talking about people that are copy/pasting the URL and not paying attention to such things.

[Joshua Dickerson]

I have a feeling that one or two people expressing concern over this won't get them to change their site. We may need several hundred requests.

[Arantor]

Well, I just went on, copied the URL here (which includes then pasted it - and it returned this actual page, rather than sm.org itself.

Which suggests it's a bug in a sharing mod of some kind rather than FB - or they fixed it in the last 2 months.

[Joshua Dickerson]

endomorph, can you give us a better explanation as to the bug because what Arantor says has been confirmed. If it is a bug with a customization, you need to bring it to the author's attention.