Facebook Error: (#120) Invalid album id

No longer an issue with Facebook Groups API deprecated as of April 22nd, 2024.

This is an error that Facebook would experience in the past, due to a bug with their Groups API, which has since been deprecated. The bug would sometimes affect publishing to Facebook Groups.

Posts ended up failing with this error, or the "Unsupported request - method type: post" error. 

Our Tech Team investigated and their findings at the time were that the issue was caused by the Facebook API bug, which could only be resolved at their end. We had reported the errors to Meta - as had many others, as this is was a problem affecting only SmarterQueue.

You can find the bug report here: Facebook API Bug - (#120) Invalid album id

What We've Found So Far

Through extensive testing, we had found that Facebook was trying to detect question-like posts (whether they contained a question mark or a character/emoji that looked like a question mark, or wording like “Why” or “Is this” or "Are you").

If they determined the Group post was a question, it seems they would return an error to us:

  • If the post had an image, we would get the “(#120) Invalid album id” error response.
  • If there was no image (meaning text only, or text + link preview), we got the “Unsupported request - method type: post” error.

In both cases, the post text was still published (so for image posts, they would be published without the image, but link previews will appear).

Possible Workaround

These are the recommendations we made at the time:

  • Try to edit your post text so it does not contain any question marks, or even look like a question - this may involve trial and error to see what Facebook allows, and what they reject.
  • We also advise that you publish without using the question mark "?" in your post - as an alternative, you could try replacing it with an interrobang "‽" (the only question mark-like symbol that appears to work right now). But remember that the wording is important too.