Link description gets truncated

Question

I am trying to post a URL with caption and description. However, only the first part of the description is displayed after posting to timeline (the first 3 lines, no "..." or other indicators to show the description is truncated).

Is there a maximum number of characters that can be used as a link description? What is it? However, I tried posting several times; sometimes it shows more characters than other times. I also see links shared by my friends which contain more lines of text as description (and the height of the box allocated by facebook for their link share is twice as higher than mine).

I thought it was because of the picture dimensions. However, I've tried several dimensions, but didn't make a difference.

Here is the code I've used:

FacebookShareLink = String.Format("https://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?app_id={0}&link={1}&picture={2}&name={3}&caption={4}&redirect_uri={5}&description={6}"
                    , FacebookApiSecret
                    , HttpUtility.UrlEncode(landingUrl)
                    , HttpUtility.UrlEncode("__ THIS IS THE PICTURE URL __")
                    , HttpUtility.UrlEncode("__ THIS IS THE NAME __")
                    , HttpUtility.UrlEncode("__ THIS IS THE CAPTION __")
                    , "__ REDIRECT URL __"
                    , HttpUtility.UrlEncode("__ THIS IS THE DESCRIPTION __")
                    );

            Response.Redirect(FacebookShareLink);

Please let me know if there is a trick for displaying longer descriptions.

Do you have screenshots that would let us see the difference between one of your posts with a "short" description and the posts you saw from your friends with a longer description? — Stéphane Bruckert, Sep 23 '13 at 14:18

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:20

You are building a URL, which has a maximum lenght (the exact value differs, but as a rule of thumb we can say that it is around 2k characters.) For more information see this question.

So based on the problem you describe I suspect that those descriptions that are truncated cause the whole lenght of the URL to exceed the specific limit for Response.Redirect().

As a workaround, you can use a HTTP POST, instead of a GET (which Response.Redirect() does), for details on how to do that see this answer.

Link description gets truncated

1 Answers1