Facebook “Like” Social Widget Bug: The page could not be reached.

September 7, 2011

If you’re landing here you’re probably searching your way through a frustrating Facebook Social Widget bug. When creating a “Like Button” over at: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/ that points to a Page on Facebook, “Like”-ing the page results in an error which says that the Like URL being used could not be reached.

Surely Facebook can reach itself can’t it? Well, not if you set your page’s restrictions to “Age Restrictions” in the “Manage Permissions” tab to anything but “Anyone (13+)”. An oversight in the Facebook javascript doesn’t actually check whether or not the user in question clicking the Like button is of the correct age group to “Like” a page. Furthermore, the error being displayed is likely not correctly handled. What the error should say, is that they are not old enough to “Like” the page.

I’ve seen this bug pop up a lot in searches, but no solutions were presented. Hope this helps!

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