Facebook API support for User-Page private messages

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Shreeni picture Shreeni · Mar 7, 2012 · Viewed 14.8k times · Source

As I understand, as per the new FB changes for brand pages (moving them to timeline structure), fans/members/likers are allowed to private message a "Page" or "Brand". I have tested this out and it seems to be working.

We have an app that allows brands to use their page through the app and the app provides many additional services on top of the standard facebook interface for actions such as - read wall, post to wall, add a comment to the wall, post photo etc.

With the new change coming in where users can private-message FB pages, we would like to extend our app's functionality to be able to read the private-messages for the pages for which we have the permissions to monitor (i.e. having the "manage_pages" permission.) As an extension, it is natural that responses to these private-messages should also happen from the app itself.

My question is - has Facebook started to support the ability to read user->pages and responding with page->user private-messages in it's Graph API for apps having "manage_pages" permission? I tried out their current documentation and their Graph API Explorer tool and could not find support for the same.

Please add reference to API/Reports/FB Releases in your responses. Thanks.

[Note: It seems that FB is not supporting this feature at the moment, even in beta. Since this is a critical feature in completing the spectrum of things an app can do in order to manage pages on behalf of owners, I have filed a feature change on FB's bug tracking at http://developers.facebook.com/bugs/108255755971025 - feel free to vote up in order for us to be able to get FB to work and resolve this issue.]

Answer

Shreeni picture Shreeni · Mar 17, 2012

Just last night, Facebook has just announced new APIs for managing Pages which include, among others, the ability read messages from a page, hiding a post etc.

Quotes from https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/page/ :

You can read the messages for a page by issuing an HTTP GET request to /PAGE_ID/conversations with a Page Access Token and read_mailbox permission.

Reply

Note that a page can only reply to a user's message. It cannot initiate a private message with a user. Also, a page can respond not more than twice to a user's message before the user has replied back.

You can reply to a user's message by issuing an HTTP POST to /CONVERSATION_ID/messages with the following parameters.

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