How to stop your Facebook Page tab images from randomly changing

We’ve had numerous Woobox customers tell us that page tab images are randomly changing to another page’s custom tab image. This is happening without any interaction. After a tab image is set, sometimes when you go back to it later the image that appears is different.  We’ve tried to figure out what is causing this bug on Facebook’s end and how you might be able to fix it.  With think we have answers to both those questions.

Why are your tab images randomly changing?
Here is what we believe is happening:  There appears to be a limit of 10,000 tab images for a Facebook app.  When a tab image gets uploaded a number between 0 and 9999 gets assigned to the tab image to use in the image URL.  The last part of the image URL is what seems to be randomly allocated and limited from 0 to 9999. For apps with large numbers of users like the Woobox Static Iframe Tab, users quickly fill up the allotted 10,000 slots and when new tab images are uploaded, it overrides an existing tab image which then changes the image on the original page.  It also prevents you from seeing the new image you upload since it is cached on their servers with the old image for a period of time.

How can you stop tab images from changing?
The only solution we’ve come up with is to set up your own custom Facebook apps hosted on our system. When you set up your own apps, only you are uploading tab images for that app reducing the chance of this happening.  Every Facebook app can be installed once for each page.  Using these instructions, you can set up as many custom page tab apps as you like, hosted on Woobox servers.  It’s completely free to set up and use a custom app, and you can even change the tab icon when you do it this way.  It’s currently the only way to reduce the possibility of your custom tab images changing.   The other option is not to use a custom tab image until this Facebook bug is fixed.

We’ve submitted a bug report and you can subscribe to it here to ensure that you are notified when Facebook fixes the issue.

Check out this and more with your own Woobox account; and keep yourself up to date in the future by following @WooboxApp on Twitter and becoming a fan of our Facebook page.