“(#100) No matching user found” - Facebook Messenger Bot Bug

On May 13th, I found that my Facebook Messenger bot failed to response some users, and as I read the error log of my webhook process, then got something like:

"error": {
    "message": "(#100) No matching user found",
    "type": "OAuthException",
    "code": 100,
    "fbtrace_id": “XXXXXXXXXXX”
}

Some Backgrounds

At this point, Facebook Messenger Bot is still new, which is reasonable to have some bugs. I’m using `Node.js for my webhook on Heroku, and I followed the tutorial provided by Facebook for setting up the bot.

Why?

Soon, I found this bug is discussed on Facebook Bug Page here. The problem is that Facebook decided to switch their encoding to use strings instead of ints for user & page IDs, which made the example code (template code) on Facebook official tutorial page fail to response users with string IDs.

Then?

Facebook send out notifications to the app developers saying:

On Tue May 17 format of user and page ids delivered via webhooks will change from an int to a string to better support default json encoder in js (that trims long ints). Please make sure your app works with string ids returned from webhooks as well as with ints.

Solution

I believe that Facebook will make the original code in the tutorial work pretty soon; however, there are people providing the solution online already. Here’s the template code that should work:

var express = require('express');
var bodyParser = require('body-parser');
var request = require("request");

var app = express();

const JSONbig = require('json-bigint')

app.set('port', (process.env.PORT || 5000));

app.use(express.static(__dirname + '/public'));
app.use(bodyParser.text({ type: 'application/json' }))

app.listen(app.get('port'), function() {
  console.log('Node app is running on port', app.get('port'));
});

var token = "<YOUR_TOEKN_HERE>";

function sendTextMessage(sender, text) {
  messageData = {
    text:text
  }
  request({
      url: 'https://graph.facebook.com/v2.6/me/messages',
      qs: {access_token:token},
      method: 'POST',
      json: {
        recipient: {id:sender},
        message: messageData,
      }
  }, function(error, response, body) {
    if (error) {
      console.log('Error sending message: ', error);
    } else if (response.body.error) {
      console.log('Error: ', response.body.error);
    }
  });
}

app.post('/webhook/', function (req, res) {

  var data = JSONbig.parse(req.body);
  messaging_events = data.entry[0].messaging;

  for (i = 0; i < messaging_events.length; i++) {

    event = data.entry[0].messaging[i];
    sender = event.sender.id.toString();

    if (event.message && event.message.text) {
      text = event.message.text;
      sendTextMessage(sender, text);
    }

  }

  res.sendStatus(200);

});

Make sure you’ve added body-parser, express, json-bigint, and request to your NPM.

Finally

My Bot, Ducky, is now working well and be public, please feel free to message him here: http://m.me/ducky.bot!