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Facebook Production Bugs

I often complain about Facebook's engineering quality (e.g., on Quora). To provide some idea of what I mean, these are some of the bugs I've encountered on Facebook's production site that I could reasonably take a screenshot of.

872 followers, 35 pins

(December 2011) Notifications menu renders too narrowly and in the wrong place.

4 likes 5 comments 2 repins

Profile picture of Dave Dash

Dave Dash What made pinterest the right medium for this. It seems to work, but sounds like there could be a lot of work of cutting up screenshots.

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Sidian Jones I'm also curious about this.

Profile picture of Maneesh Arora

Maneesh Arora Perhaps the cutting up was outsourced to a firm in India? hah!

Profile picture of Cynthia Schames

Cynthia Schames Seriously? I'm a sales idiot and I can do the "cutting up" in about three keystrokes.

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David James What a terrible bug!

(December 2011) Duplicate notifications.

3 likes 2 comments 1 repin

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Hosted Quickbooks You should take a look at Fan Pages in Firefox...

Profile picture of Steve Miller

Steve Miller Yikes! Spam!

(November 2011) Messages doesn't work for a couple of minutes.

1 like 2 comments 1 repin

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FrightCatalog.com Glad they got this fixed!

Profile picture of James Taylor

James Taylor Does not look good.

(October 2011) This isn't technically a bug, but I thought it was an awful UX. #### I got this rooster, but the actual settings panel where you enable subscribers doesn't have a similar note. Is the plan to just keep roostering people forever? If this is important, then when I go to edit Subscriber settings, it should have a little note like this. This rooster only loads about half the time for me, and takes a very long time to load (a half second or so after all other content on the page has loaded). I clicked "update search settings" and it silently set my search privacy to "Everyone" without a confirmation dialog and without showing me where the setting is or helping me understand my options. My search privacy was already at "Friends of Friends". After I restored my search privacy setting, this rooster reappeared. As a user, I don't want roosters like this and I don't want any buttons anywhere on the site ever which change my privacy without showing me the old setting, the new setting, confirming that the change is something I want, and making it clear how I go change it back.

2 likes

(October 2011) Friends, notifications and messages fail to render on the mobile site.

3 likes 2 repins

(October 2011) Entire mobile site was completely broken for about 36 hours. This issue persisted across multiple reloads.

1 comment

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Meghan Croz this is still broken, also if you go through the desktop site on mobile it will crash safari.

(October 2011) Facebook fails to post comments which contain manually-entered mentions for invalid object IDs.

(October 2011) Guess what this interface does? Updates your status? Nope! It posts to a group.

1 comment

Profile picture of Sandeep Shete

Sandeep Shete I was trying to add long post to a group few days back, it was really long, when I finally finished writing I saw that publish button is not working...that annoyed me like anything. I didn't realize whats happening. I copied entire post in notepad, closed current post and opened new one again pasted it back, again same thing. Then I realized that button is getting disabled after I paste contents , so that was done to avoid posts beyond character limits. Nowhere was any notification that there exists a character limit. I finally split the post and added remaining parts in comments section.

(October 2011) Zero or more!

1 comment

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Serkan Piantino seems accurate. closing.

(October 2011) Improper escaping of middot.

(October 2011) Groups feature completely broken because of Javascript errors.

1 repin

(October 2011) Another really bad scrape from the new share scraper.

(October 2011) Text displays "2" but there is only one image.

3 comments

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Jakub Vrána I've fixed this today.

Profile picture of Jakub Vrána

Jakub Vrána I've fixed this today again.

(October 2011) Approve all what?

(October 2011) I had a "1" here for about two months. No activity showed up when I clicked through. It eventually started working correctly.

2 repins

(October 2011) Facebook's share scraper was rewritten to almost always capture some random HTML tags as part of the link summary text.

(October 2011) This text is intended for translators.

3 comments

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Heather Rocha doesn't that mean that the other person is blocked?

Profile picture of Niranjan Prithviraj

Niranjan Prithviraj right... this message is so comprehensive that im sure every single of the 500mil users will get it, immediately..

Profile picture of Jakub Vrána

Jakub Vrána I've fixed this today.

(October 2011) Clicking things too quickly breaks contextual menus.

(October 2011) One of these buttons is a dropdown menu you hover to reveal. One is a dropdown menu you click to reveal. The style of the two dropdown menus is significantly different (one uses a "tooltip" style and one uses the new "segmented dropmenu" style).

1 like

(October 2011) The behavior of these UI elements is inconsistent with their presentation. The first two things are dropdown menus which you hover over to reveal. The third thing is a button you click. The fourth thing is a dropdown menu you click to reveal. Why are there two totally different styles of dropdown menus (buttons 1+2 vs button 4), and two identical-looking button styles which interact differently (buttons 1+2 vs button 3)?

2 likes

(October 2011) Tooltip obscured by a tooltip.

(October 2011) Incorrectly rendered menu header.

(October 2011) Weird white oval on timeline.

(October 2011) This is the same story, but it is alternately an "activity" or a "life event" depending on how people interact with it.

(October 2011) "Facepile" UI element shows me online; UI directly below it shows me offline; chat menu shows me offline.

(October 2011) An empty life event (?).

(October 2011) "Facebook Security Page" link went nowhere. Also: this dialog is amazing.

(September 2011) Facebook later auto-populated my Institute of Technology Madras list with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook designer Soleio.

4 likes 2 comments 2 repins

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Ben Hiller IIT Madras has very high standards, only those with UIDs lower than 15 are accepted.

(September 2011) Facebook created an "Indian Institute of Technology Madras" smart friends list for me, listing my classmates at Indian Institute of Technology Madras. I have never attended Indian Institute of Technology Madras.

3 likes 1 repin

(September 2011) Ungrammatical string.

(September 2011) This was an actual bug, rather than an an Ajax race condition.

1 like

(September 2011) Rendering issue with Timeline.

(September 2011) Facebook launched a broken Timeline activity view.

1 repin

(September 2011) When Ticker launched, my homepage took 12 seconds to render.

1 like

(September 2011) The notification approvals page didn't render any content.

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