Facebook Follow Button plugin doesn't allow periods in profile

Question

Trying to set up a follow button with Facebook's plugin here:

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/follow/

I've found that any profile url I enter that contains periods (for example, http://www.facebook.com/John.Smith) will return an error.

From the error console I receive

Failed to load resource: The requested URL was not found on this server.

This happens with the HTML5, iframe and URL versions of the plugin. Just out of curiosity I tried encoding the period with %2E, and I also tried using the numeric profile ID, but neither worked.

Is there any other trick I can try to make this work?

Answer 1

I don't think it's a problem with the social plugin. please enter the profile https://www.facebook.com/michael.kamleitner for testing purposes - everything's fine here.

If I open the profile url of John Smith I'm getting an error ("Page not found") - so imho the profile is restricted/not public at all. If it's privacy restricted, you can't use it for the follow-plugin. If you have access to John Smith's account, please double check his follower-settings: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=followers