New Facebook Platform Product Changes and Policy Updates

Biggest change is a pretty accelerated deprecation of the publish_actions permission, effective now for any new apps and August for all apps previously granted this permission.

This is the permission required for an app to post on behalf of a user.

On the one hand, it is nice to see this oft-abused method abolished. It was always a bit of a joke that you could get approved for it and then have to adhere to a bunch of hand-waving policy around "but don't fill in the user's message for them" without anything technically standing in the way of abuse.

This will kill many FB apps. And for everyone who has been on the treadmill of having to update their apps for API changes every 4 - 6 months, this is probably the straw that breaks the camel's back for abandoning the platform as a whole. What with having to pay for content distribution through promoted posts, and the constant API churn, it just isn't worth it. Fine.