Design, Coding, SEO and Social Media Marketing, WordPress & Facebook

Many users have had a problem obtaining a vanity URL from Facebook after their fan count has reached the 25-fan threshold. Even though the vanity URL they enter exceeds the 5-character limit set by Facebook, they get the error message: "Usernames must be at least 5 characters long."

A bug report was opened on the Facebook Developer Wiki Bug Tracker on June 24, 2010, and a number of workarounds have been proposed.

I encountered this error today and decided to try a version of the fix suggested in Comment #14 of the bug report:

This works in IE8 only...

On the "check availability" page, press F12 to activate the Developer Tools feature of IE8

In the Developer Tools window, click on the Find menu and choose "Select Element by Click"

As you move the mouse over the web page, blue boxes will appear for each element you move over

Click on the input box where you would type the desired username and the Developer Tools window will show you the HTML tag for that box which should look like this:

<input name="page_input" title="Enter desired username" class="inputtext DOMControl_placeholder" id="page_input" ...

Change the "class" attribute's value from "inputtext DOMControl_placeholder" to just "inputtext"

In the Developer Tools window, click on the Outline menu and choose "Clear Outlines" to get rid of the blue box.

The form should now work .

Firefox Inspect Element Fix

I tried something similar in Firefox, using the feature in the Firebug plugin called "Inspect Element". (UPDATE: Commenters have reported this same fix working in Safari & Google Chrome!)

I right-clicked directly on the text-entry box, and from the contextual menu I selected "Inspect Element":

In the "Inspect Element" screen that appears at the bottom, you'll see the CSS class setting for the input box — 'class="inputtext DOMControl_placeholder"':

I deleted the " DOMControl_placeholder" so that the only class was "inputtext"...

I then clicked the "Check Availability" button and it worked!

I understand that this might not work for some users and I won't be able to troubleshoot other peoples' problems with this Facebook bug.