Empathy will not authorize facebook account

Question

Short and sweet: I can not get Empathy to add facebook as an account. At all.

It asks me to log into facebook (the facebookname@chat.facebook.com will not work here, I tried. Comes back as invalid, and yes I used the 'url' username) in a chrome browser (even had firefox as default when attempting this, same thing occured), and all I get is 'Success Warning: Treat the above url like your password' or something close. And account settings still 'waits' for verification from facebook.

Anyone else fix this issue yet? I've disabled secure browsing, account login notifications, logged out, removed ubuntu app from facebook.

Otherwise I'll just grab another chat for ubuntu.

Answer 1

Facebook Chat will stop working in Empathy and other third-party desktop instant messaging clients from April 30, 2015

At some point after April 30 — Facebook say API deprecation may take a few weeks — trying to connect to Facebook Chat using an application like Pidgin or Empathy will no longer work and will throw a connection error.

Although the (seemingly sudden) loss of a popular chat service will surprise desktop users it is not news to developers.

Facebook announced it would deprecate the XMPP Chat API that lets third-party applications ‘connect’ to Facebook chat way back in April of last year.

A replacement API for accessing Facebook Chat (or Messenger) has not been announced.

Source: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2015/04/facebook-chat-api-empathy-pidgin-stop-working

In the meantime, in security settings in Facebook you can generate a special password for Jabber that will allow Empathy and Pidgin to work.

Answer 2

What's happened is facebook.com (well the chat) does not use https anymore. Empathy wants to. You have to manually edit the settings. It's easy, but again you're connecting via http, so be on a trusted network.

Steps:

1. Close out empathy/account settings.
2. Open terminal (ctrl+alt+T or search terminal)

3. Enter this command:

   sudo nano /usr/share/accounts/providers/facebook.provider
   

4. Look for the following line in the file:

   <group name="user_agent">
   

5. Add this directly after that line:

   <setting name="AllowedSchemes" type="as">['https','http']</setting>
   

6. Hit ctrl+X

7. Type yes or y, hit enter
8. Reboot your system
9. You should now be able to log into facebook from account settings.

Note: Copy the commands above exactly. In otherwords /usr/ is the actual path, not to be replaced with your own username.

And again, you're now connecting over an unsecured/encrypted connection to facebook. Use this only on a trusted network.