Facebook Changes Permissions Protocol

At the Wildfire offices, we put a lot of emphasis on sharing knowledge amongst ourselves and with our users. As such, we wanted to let you know of a Facebook change happening that will impact the flow of user actions within your current or upcoming campaigns. Facebook will be switching to a new permissions protocol on their platform starting on Wednesday, June 30th. The new permissions protocol has required all third-party developers such as Wildfire to modify their applications according to the new standard, which will also completely change Wildfire’s current permissions system.


Our development team has worked very hard to adapt the Wildfire platform for these changes, and we have succeeded. We fully expect the transition to go smoothly and not result in any outages or downtime. However, the Facebook change will slightly alter the user experience of the Wildfire promotion application in the following way:

Now when a user clicks from the Facebook fan page tab to a Wildfire campaign they will see a new Facebook permissions dialogue box asking the user to allow the application access to particular elements of the user's profile information (see image below). Once users have already allowed the application they will not need to allow it again for future Wildfire promotions of the same campaign type (Promotions or Sweepstakes for example).

If a user chooses to not allow the application, we do have the ability to automatically redirect the user off Facebook to a microsite version of the promotion hosted by Wildfire. The microsite version looks nearly identical and provides the same experience for a user to enter and participate in your promotion. It allows for the user to use their login information to connect using Facebook Connect, which enables users to "Like" a fan page, post news feed stories, and directly invite friends, just as if they were on Facebook itself – but if the user logs in with Facebook Connect, here too they will need to allow the application permission to access their profiles. If the user chooses to decline a second time, they can still enter the promotion providing the campaign doesn’t require the user to Like the fan page. The user will also not be able to post a news feed post or invite Facebook friends.

If you have any questions about these changes you can always feel free to call us at (888) 274-0929, we would be happy to help. We will continue to keep all of our customers notified if changes occur with any features or within Facebook. As always, thank you for being an enthusiastic Wildfire customer!