IN THIS ARTICLE
What is the Share Count Proxy API
The Share Count Proxy API provides....
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Better Protection of Visitor Privacy / Easier GDPR Compliance
The "original" share buttons from Facebook, Pinterest and others automatically transmit data of your visitors to the social network sites as soon as they visit your website. This is also the case if you use custom Share Buttons (such as a plugin) and choose to display Share Counts. Data is shared without the need for visitors to click on a share button and therefore have no choice.
The Share Count Proxy API allows site visitors to see how popular your pages are without needless leakage to the social networks (unless they decide to share, of course). Once enabled, all Share Count queries to the Social Networks are proxied through this API and visitor privacy is protected (like an anonymous VPN).
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Better Facebook Share Counts
You can set Facebook App credentials for your Site Profile. Calling Facebook's Graph API with authenticated credentials results in better, more accurate Share Counts. It is not possible to safely make such authenticated requests without a server-side solution, like this proxy.
Also, since this Proxy API protects user privacy, Firefox and other major browsers do not default block requests to it like they do to client-side requests to Facebook's and other such APIs.
How-to enable the Local Share Count Proxy API in WordPress
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Head over to the Advanced Settings section of your Shareaholic WordPress Admin console (WP Admin -> Shareaholic -> Plugin Settings):
- Ensure Local Share Count Proxy is not disabled and "Save Changes"
- You're done!
Troubleshoot Common API Issues
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Check whether the Local Share Count Proxy API is "Reachable". This status is displayed under Shareaholic -> Plugin Settings -> Server Connectivity:
Note that the status will only show if the API is enabled.
- If the status reads "Unable to reach the server-side Share Count API".
- Click the "Recheck" link to see if it resolves itself. If it does not resolve the problem, Contact Us. It's most likely a firewall problem (where your host is blocking calls to Facebook.com, etc) that we can help you diagnose! You need to ensure that your host/server is not blocking requests to Pinterest.com, Facebook.com, etc.
- In some cases, the issue lies with the data that the social network is sending back. If you've confirmed that your firewall settings are not blocking share counts, please let us know.
- Server-side Share Count API is reachable but share counts still aren't showing! Head over to the troubleshooting Share Counts guide for detailed help.
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Retrieving, caching and serving Share Counts can be a server and database intensive activity which can test even the best of web hosts. If your server is not being able to keep up with the API, try the hosted version of the Share Count Proxy API instead.