[Plugin: SEO Facebook Comment] Facebook API Timeout – "name lookup timed out"

I’m getting this error.

Fatal error: Uncaught CurlException: 6: name lookup timed out thrown in <webroot>/wp-content/plugins/seo-facebook-comments/facebook/base_facebook.php on line 825

… After looking at the code, I found the culprit was https://api-read.facebook.com/restserver.php. After trying to resolve this url from multiple locations and different ISPs, I confirmed that the lag is something on facebook’s end.

You could say that this is not SEO Facebook’s problem… however, it shouldn’t cause my website to “hang” and display obnoxious Error: code on my website. The plugin caused my website to take forever to load…. and this is my complaint.

I lowered the curl_timeout times, but most users don’t have the knowledge to do this. I recommend you handle this error more gracefully… my quick solution was to deactivate your plugin across all of my websites. And who knows when I might get back around to reactivating.

As a developer, you have a choice to say “This is not our fault or our problem, it’s Facebook” … or you can choose to do the right thing, anticipate that this is going to happen again in the future, and make sure that your plugin doesn’t cause 10 second page load times for your users’ websites.

I hope you make the right decision and update accordingly. I’ll keep an eye on your changelogs.

-Seth.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-facebook-comments/