linkedin share sent to blank form

I'm not sure what's happening here. LinkedIn uses the Open Graph tags on your page, which JFBConnect sets, to create the thumbnail description for your page.

We used some other tools to remotely fetch your page, and they all seemed to work just fine as well. The only thing I can recommend right now is a) checking your Apache logs to make sure you aren't, for some reason (like a firewall or security extension) blocking requests from LinkedIn to scan your page or b) wait a few days to see if LinkedIn is just taking it's time to scan your pages.

Sorry I don't have a definitive answer for you right now, but let us know how things go, and we'll gladly help however we can.

Thanks,
Alex

Sorry if my answer seemed curt. I actually spent a decent amount of time trying to understand what could be wrong on your site. The steps I took were:
1) Looking at the HTML output on your page for the proper Open Graph tags - Check, all seems right.
* All tests are with /info/blog/260-busting-your-online-brand-big-mistakes , just so you know
2) I ran your page through the following tools to check if they were reachable by 'automated' scanners:
web-sniffer.net/
www.internetmarketingninjas.com/header-checker/
tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker
* All came back with a 200 code, which is correct
3) I ran your page through the Facebook URL debug tool:
developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/
* It was able to scan your page properly. Unfortunately, LinkedIn doesn't have such a tool, so we can't test what LinkedIn sees
4) I ran your page through the Social Debug tool.
* It also was able to see your tags properly and render what posts would look like in Facebook, Google+ and others. It doesn't support LinkedIn yet though either.

So, with those tests, it seems like things are working and everything does 'look' right. The best suggestions I have are to wait. At the time though, I didn't know it had been like this for a week as you didn't mention that originally.

The best suggestions I'd have for testing are:
a) Disable the SSL requirement on your site, temporarily, and see if the non-https version of the pages have the same problem.
b) Edit the /components/com_jfbconnect/libraries/provider/linkedin.php file. Around line 123, you'll see:Delete those lines. They aren't necessary any more and will be removed in an upcoming release.

As for general improvements, but unrelated to the above issue, is:
x) You have a hard-coded og:image tag across your site for:
cdn-mediamonkie12.netdna-ssl.com/images/social/logo_200.png
While not bad, that's at the top of your template, which means that JFBConnect's 'better' selection of an image on pages where we can determine one still won't be used. I'd recommend adding that tag to the Open Graph -> Configuration -> Defaults area, like:y) Enable the Open Graph plugins for any extensions you have installed so JFBConnect is better able to determine the right tags for your pages.

Finally, for your last post, there are a lot of vague things you mention. If you have more information on any of the following (especially links that we can look at), that would help us know if the issues you found are old and have been fixed or things we weren't even aware of:

A few seemed to be aware of some of the problems in your products as a few had said they at one point had used on their websites.

Please let me know more about this.

If this hasn't happened to anyone else... in reading through the threads I can see that sometimes problems just appear or leave and come back with new updates so this may be the start of a larger compatibility issue with linkedin

Very rarely are there issues in JFBConnect that need to be fixed for compatibility with LinkedIn. Usually, LinkedIn, or the other social networks, break the features they've stated and we have to wait for them to re-instate them.

as I have been told linkedin has made some changes in their system earlier this month that perhaps this product is not up to date on.

We try to stay up to date on all the social networks we integrate with. I'm not aware of any changes earlier this month that we need to update for, but if you know of something, definitely let us know so we can investigate further.

I hope that explains more, but if you have any questions, please let me know.

Thanks,
Alex

Oh, and the other thing I mentioned in my first post, was to check your Apache request logs to see if your site is somehow blocking requests from LinkedIn. That was the point of me testing with other services, which I failed to mention the reasoning behind.

Alex

Monk,
I've been doing a lot of research and going through multiple posts on LinkedIn's forums. Here's the summation of the suggestions from other users and LinkedIn themselves. There is only one issue below (that I can see) that could be an HTML issue on your page that could be partially caused by JFBConnect (the duplicate prefix tag). The rest are issues that would be either with your server or with LinkedIn itself. Hopefully, something below sticks out as a possible investigation point:

LinkedIn IPs blocked
developer.linkedin.com/comment/32664#comment-32664
The IPs from LinkedIn were inadvertantly blocked by the hosting company/server. Please check the list there and check your server's config (or contact your host) and make sure these IPs can access your site.

User Agent Restrictions
LinkedIn uses the User Agent string below:

LinkedInBot/1.0 (compatible; Mozilla/5.0; Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.1 +http://www.linkedin.com)

I tested your site using an agent with that string and the contents came back correctly, so this likely isn't the issue. Checking that you don't block unknown agents, or that one specifically, may help.

Invalid Namespace Prefix
developer.linkedin.com/comment/27580#comment-27580
Your HTML tag looks like:The 2nd prefix=".." tag is coming from JFBConnect and is correct. The first is from another extension on your site (or your template). Having 2 isn't proper syntax. I'd recommend trying to determine what's inserting that duplicate tag and remove it.
I highly doubt this is the issue, as the namespace prefixes are almost universally ignored, but want to call it out regardless.

General HTML errors
stackoverflow.com/questions/18468892/lin...t-parsing-open-graph
Your page generates quite a few validation errors. Most pages do, so that's not something I'd normally care about or even mention. However, it's possible that some of those are the cause. Most of the issues are attributes in tags that aren't valid for your doctype. Those are almost all universally ignored. More important ones like non-closed tags below could be causing the LinkedIn scraper to not properly scan your content:
validator.w3.org/check?uri=https%3A%2F%2...ctype=Inline&group=0

Line 671, Column 324: end tag for element "p" which is not open
Line 671, Column 862: end tag for element "p" which is not open
Line 926, Column 6: end tag for element "div" which is not open

LinkedIn's cache
developer.linkedin.com/comment/31559#comment-31559
I hate to mention waiting at all, because I know you're not a fan of that term. Please note the above post though where they note that they cache values for 1 week. That means that if your tags were read previously, it can take up to 7 days for new values to apply. To get around this, after you make any changes above, I'd try creating a new dummy article that uses a new URL. That way it's 'fresh' for LinkedIn and you will be able to be sure if the change above helped or not.

Another thread I found with users reporting tags not working is this one . It mostly rehashes the same posts as above. Unfortunately, most of those threads span more than a year.. but are still being posted to. This means it's a continuous issue with LinkedIn that affects some sites. There's no consensus on the cause, though the above points distill the most common 'fixes'.

Finally, you said the following above:

We have left linked in enabled on our site so you can see the behavior however as we had asked in our original question we don't believe this to be the expected result but need someone to confirm.

I'm not sure what original question issue you're talking about here if it's not the missing description. I just want to make sure I'm not missing another issue you posted about.

I hope that helps, but please keep us posted on what you find,
Alex

Absolutely. Here's a few good examples:
Our Demo Site, using a slightly older version of JFBConnect (v6.0.2):
demo.sourcecoast.com/index.php?option=co...icle&id=8&Itemid=158

Social Debug:
socialdebug.com/tags/open-graph/description

Away Florida:
awayflorida.com/about-us

Those 3 are sites run by 'us', so take whatever bias you will with those.. but we certainly don't go out of our way to make LinkedIn work just on them, or else we would have simply implemented whatever fix was necessary.

As for customer sites, we don't actively promote sites of our users because we want to get their permission first. One site I know would have no problem with extra links to them, that we're completely unaffiliated with, is Bayou Buzz. A specific article link with working LinkedIn Share buttons is:
www.bayoubuzz.com/buzz/item/660791-major...ppeal-federal-denial
Of course, feel free to try others on that site.

Another site is the Joomla Extension Directory itself. They choose not to show the LinkedIn buttons on their site (for whatever reasons they choose), but the Open Graph tags and LinkedIn functionality are provided by JFBConnect... although, please note that the JED still uses Joomla 1.5, so their version of JFBConnect is quite old... at v4.3. Still.. it works. To test, please try the LinkedIn Share Button Generator . That link is useful as well since it can be used with your URL to still show that no tags are shown, which means it's not our implementation of the share button itself and our Open Graph tags certainly look correct to us.

There are plenty of other users who have posted URLs to their sites in our forums that you're welcome to test. Feel free to click around and test some of those sites. I won't go out of my way to call out specific sites to test with though since many sites may not want to become testing grounds. Of course, if you find another site that has this same issue, let us know

Finally, we can't find any other reports of user's having a blank LinkedIn share button on their site. Outside of that search, which I went through many pages of, I can't remember any requests for help on this issue. If there are 7 other customers with this issue, I would love to have you post or Private Message those sites to us. I'm not sure why they didn't contact us previously, but we would have gladly tried to get to the bottom of this issue earlier, if it's something we can correct. If we have some comparison points that we can compare multiple sites with teh same problem, that may very well help us narrow things down. Without that, we're stuck with trawling the LinkedIn forums which, as you can see above, have many reports of similar issues and all of those users in the topics I linked to absolutely aren't using JFBConnect. To put it simply, *we* haven't heard of this issue before you. While I understand it's frustrating that your the first to report it, if there are 7 other clients with sites out there experiencing the same issue, we haven't heard of them. Knowing about those sites may very well help us narrow down the cause, whether it be in JFBConnect or not.

Thanks,
Alex