Facebook Error: Unsupported request - method type: post

We are currently seeing Facebook Group posts failing with either this error or the " (#120) Invalid album id" error. 

Our Tech Team has investigated and both errors are due to a bug in the Facebook API at their end. We have reported the errors to Facebook - as have many others, this is not a problem affecting only SmarterQueue - and they are investigating.

You can find the bug report here: Unsupported request - method type: post. 

What We've Found So Far

Through extensive testing, we've found that Facebook is trying to detect question-like posts (whether they contain a question mark, or a character/emoji that looks like a question mark, or wording like “Why” or “Is this” or "Are you").

If they determine the Group post is a question, it seems they will return an error to us:

  • If the post has an image, we get the “(#120) Invalid album id” error response.
  • If there’s no image (meaning text only, or text + link preview), we get the “Unsupported request - method type: post” error.

In both cases, the post text is still published (so for image posts, they will be published without the image, but link previews will appear).

Possible Workaround

We're making the following suggestions:

  • You should try to edit your post text so it does not contain any question marks, or even look like a question - this may involve trial and error to see what Facebook allows, and what they reject. Some known phrases that seem to get rejected include: "Can you", "Could you", "Did you", "Do you", "Does this", "Ever wanted to", "Has he", "Have you".
  • We also advise that you publish without using a question mark "?" in your post. - as an alternative, you could try replacing it with an interrobang "‽" (the only question mark-like symbol that appears to work right now). But remember that the wording is important too.
    • Example of a post that fails: Are you tired of busy work?
    • Re-worded post that succeeds: Tired of busy work‽
  • If you're just publishing text/link posts, you may not need or want to do anything. It looks like these posts get published correctly to your group (despite the error message) - however there's no guarantee that this will always be the case. The only issue you would have is that you won't be able to get post stats for these posts in SmarterQueue; and you would need to tidy up the failed posts (either delete them, or re-queue them if you want them to be recycled).