Fix for Digsby’s Facebook authentication error and broken Facebook support

To all Digsby users (ignore this post if you don’t use Digsby):

If you use Digsby with Facebook, you might have noticed that things behave strangely — the program pops up a window looking like this when it tries to connect to Facebook:

Then after you give it your credentials, Digsby still thinks you’re not logged in, and so on.

If you found this page via a google search, there’s a simple hack / workaround you can use to patch up this problem. Basically, instead of using the Facebook protocol to connect, we let Digsby use the Jabber protocol as a ‘proxy’ to connect to Facebook:

  1. Go to Digsby -> My Accounts and in the Add Accounts section at the top, select the Jabber icon.
  2. You should get a window that looks like this:
  3. In the Jabber ID box, put your.id@chat.facebook.com, and in the password field, put your facebook password. For example, if your facebook page is at facebook.com/yourname, your Jabber id is yourname@chat.facebook.com.
  4. Remove the facebook account from Digsby

At this point, you’re done: Digsby should give you no more problems about Facebook.

Warning: the following is unnecessary and experimental! It might screw up the entire Digsby installation, forcing you to reinstall!

However, you can replace the Jabber icon with the Facebook one (this is for purely cosmetic purposes):

  1. Go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Digsby\res\skins\default\serviceicons (that’s the default installation path on my machine, yours may be different)
  2. Delete jabber.png, duplicate facebook.png, and rename it jabber.png
  3. Restart Digsby

There you have it — hack accomplished:

40 thoughts on “Fix for Digsby’s Facebook authentication error and broken Facebook support

  1. I have tested this on Windows 7 and Windows Vista: for me, this fix works in both these operating systems.

    Sorry — this fix does not cover the facebook newsfeed, only the chat. I’ve always used Digsby only as a chat client: the newsfeed support was buggy from the very beginning for me.

    Like

  2. Everything seemed to work until the icon changes. I uninstalled the app, restarted the PC, re-installed the app, and it works. It remembered my account settings, using Facebook through Jabber. I guess I’ll live with the icon mismatch.

    Like

  3. works great if all your interested in is CHAT – what if you WANT the facebook wall integration features to work?

    Like

  4. This works wonders for getting Digsby to stay logged into chat. However, it has one crippling flaw: Using a Jabber login for FB chat disables message notifications for Facebook’s desktop website. This can cause serious problems in the form of missing messages, especially for someone like me who tends to rely on non-IM messages for some important communications.

    I’m still of the opinion that Digsby needs to fix its non-Jabber Facebook authorization. That is, if they even have a competent support team that knows of this bug anymore.

    Like

Leave a comment