Facebook requests dialog not showing message to recepient

Mike Hogan picture Mike Hogan · Jun 9, 2011 · Viewed 8k times · Source

If I invoke this:

    FB.ui({
        method: 'apprequests',
        title: 'Who would you like to invite?',
        message: 'Hello there'
    });

The 'preview' in the requests dialog that comes up asking me to select recepients, suggests that the recipient(s) will will get the message "Hello there".

But all they get is:

'name' send you a request in 'app'

which does not motivate them to click on it.

Anybody else getting this problem? Any solutions?

Answer

Jesse Proulx picture Jesse Proulx · May 8, 2012

You can change the message in the notification if you pass the "new_style_message" parameter in the FB.ui method. This will change the format of the notification from:

$name sent you a request in $app

to

$name $message in $app

When passing a custom message field using this parameter you are limited to a certain number of characters, the title parameter is ignored (for the notification, it will still show on the games/apps page), and you cannot change the "in $app" suffix so your message will need to be a short sentence fragment:

FB.ui({
    method: 'apprequests',
    message: 'sent you an awesome request'
    new_style_message: true
});

Note that this is an undocumented feature; official support might be unreliable and it may change in the future without warning.