Facebook Error: Unsupported request - method type: post

This is an error that Facebook would experience in the past, due to a bug with their Groups API, which has since been deprecated. The bug would sometimes affect publishing to Facebook Groups.

Posts ended up failing with this error, or the "(#120) Invalid album id" error. 

Our Tech Team investigated and their findings at the time were that the issue was caused by the Facebook API bug, which could only be resolved at their end. We had reported the errors to Meta - as had many others, as this is was a problem affecting only SmarterQueue.

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

What We've Found So Far

Through extensive testing, we had found that Facebook was trying to detect question-like posts (whether they contained a question mark or a character/emoji that looked like a question mark, or wording like “Why” or “Is this” or "Are you").

If they determined the Group post was a question, it seems they would return an error to us:

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

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

Possible Workaround

These are the recommendations we made at the time:

• 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", and "Have you".
• We also advise that you publish without using the 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).