Issue with Facebook social plugins, not working for logged out users

I recently bumped into an issue with a Facebook social plugin not working properly for logged out Facebook users. The Facebook social plugins allow to visitors make comments, give likes, shares and more.

This plugins usually are connected with a Facebook App that holds some configurations options for the widgets. Also is used to keep track and stats in Facebook about your site.

For some reason, in one of our websites, users that were not logged into Facebook were not able to see the comment widget in the post or even see the like widget. The strange part was that in other sites we didn’t have this problem, ever.

Doing a little of research we found that the Facebook Apps have some restrictions, like age or region. If any of these restrictions are active Facebook needs information about the user to validate them, if the user is not logged in Facebook can’t know if the user have certain age or is from a certain country.

So, to solve this issue and always show the comments. Go to the Facebook developer dashboard, find your app for your website, Go into Configuration and look for Application Restrictions. Be sure that all these options are deactivated (off course, if you want it).

That’s it, you’ll know have the social widgets working.