fb_xd_fragment Facebook Bugfix

My server suddenly logged a rash of weird requests with something like ?fb_xd_fragment= in the URL. This is not good, because if you try this manually it renders a blank page, and blank pages are BAAAAAAAD! So upon googling I found it’s a bug with new Facebook API and (you guessed it) Internet Exploder. Here is a fix I found at Colnect.com and am reposting with my own comments. It works if you are using the xfbml method of implementing the Facebook Like button.
If you’re using iframe I don’t know what you would do, or whether you would even see this issue.

Where you have your FB.init, add a channelUrl parameter as follows:

FB.init({appId: appId, status: true, cookie: true, xfbml: true, channelUrl: 'http://example.com/channel.html'});
// ^ channel URL above used to workaround fb_xd_fragment bug

Next implement a special static channel page. On that page include the javascript for the Facebook connect as follows:

    <script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js"></script>

Unknown at this writing whether you are meant to remove the original line of code where you include the facebook connect URL but I suspect not–I suspect this is just a special deal for IE users. Also he made reference to setting the expiry headers correctly on the channel page or it could slow things down. Here is a page that talks about expiry headers. I’m guessing you would set the expiry time to never, since the channel is a static page. Also, since my site is wordpress, you don’t do headers directly in the static content area of the page, but rather in some “meta” way. Here is a page that discusses how you can use .htaccess to set your expiry headers in a wordpress blog running on Apache.

Anyway I will update this blog post in a week or so to let you know if it stopped those weird requests coming in.