Facebook not recognizing website redirects.

Shannon Lowe

Hi! Having an issue with Facebook recognizing our school website's redirects. I've called Blackbaud help, and they say it's a Facebook issue, but getting a live human at Facebook is like finding a magical glitter fairy, so....


Our school website is mingovalley.org. I made a website redirect so we could have a custom URL that is mingovalley.org/boxoffice. (The actual URL it is redirecting to  is https://www.mingovalley.org/vintage-hitchcock-tickets). That mingovalley.org/boxoffice URL works everywhere--you can type it in any browser, or embed it in an email or another website, and it always goes to the right place. But when I go to our business Facebook page and type "Hey, stop by and visit mingovalley.org/boxoffice," it always creates this error:



The only workaround is that on Facebook, I have to put the actual, long, messier URL (https://www.mingovalley.org/vintage-hitchcock-tickets). But the whole point is to use the custom one to market the site. It's not the first time this has happened to us--anytime I have tried to plug a Blackbaud website redirect into Facebook I get the same issue, even though the redirect works fine everywhere else. Does anyone have any experience with this before I disappear down the rabbit hole of finding help at Facebook? Thank you!

David Ready

Hi, Shannon,

This has been a problem for us for YEARS, and I have only been able to do the workaround you suggested.

-David

FYI, Here is what Blackbaud Support told me in January 2019:

This is something that we are aware of. Unfortunately, at this time, this is not something we would be able to correct as the issue is being caused by Facebook adding attributes to the URL when the URL is clicked from their site. This then causes our redirects to no longer work properly. Because the attribute that is added to the URL is a unique ID every time and we are not able to insert wildcards into redirect URLs, there would be no way to set up the redirect to avoid this issue.

At this time, our recommendation would be to use the actual page URL rather than a redirect for anything you intend to place in a Facebook post, as it would avoid this problem. I do understand that this is not ideal, as our URLs can get lengthy and I apologize for the inconvenience.

I expressed my frustration and disappointment, and this was their response at that time:

I spoke with my Product Development team and they confirm that this is not something that would on an upcoming roadmap. Once again, I do apologize for the frustration.

I would definitely recommend adding an idea to our Ideas Portal, found here: https://blackbaudk12.ideas.aha.io/ideas/. This is where our developers would like to see what features and changes our users would like to see made to the software. I know that this is not an ideal solution, but it would help bring more visibility to the issue.

Shannon Lowe

It's maddening, and it doesn't seem insurmountable for them to fix it. Honestly, I don't buy Blackbaud's answer that it's a Facebook issue. Facebook is geared toward marketers and I see other companies using what are clearly custom URLs all the time. It's something about Blackbaud. Very frustrating that they won't give it any attention.