Thursday, November 17, 2016

Using Pidgin and purple-facebook for Facebook chat may also cause problems. App passwords may help.

Earlier I had problems with the Miranda NG Facebook plugin causing captchas on Facebook. I would get captchas even when posting and sharing very obviously innocent stuff. The plugin would get updated, and captchas would stop, but then they would start again later. So, I gave up on that and started using Pidgin with purple-facebook in Windows as well.

I had been using Pidgin with Purple Facebook in Linux for a while, but when I started using it in Windows, Facebook reacted as if my account had been hacked. I was forced to change my password, and examine recent activity. This problem repeated. I don't know if it's related to use of purple-facebook in Windows or use of it in too many places or a newer version or what. I reported the bug, and other users responded that they also encountered the problem.

Facebook has an app passwords feature which allows you to auto-generate passwords and use those passwords for apps instead of your main Facebook password. I'm now using that feature, with separate app passwords for every different Pidgin installation. So far so good.

Oh, and by the way, if Facebook forces you to change your password, don't bother trying to re-use the old password. They seem to blacklist the passwords used when their system thinks your account was hacked.

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