Facebook® Application Development For Dummies®

Creating Test Accounts

I suppose as long as you're building a Facebook application, you're going to want to have some test accounts set up. With these accounts, you can test the application without worrying about friends seeing that testing or without worrying about anything going wrong that could affect your personal Facebook account. The problem is that Facebook, through policy, won't allow people to create fake accounts. It wants every profile on its network to be real and authentic, and it will suspend accounts that violate this rule. So how do you test your application?

Facebook frowns big-time on fake accounts! Always be sure that if you need an account to test with, you identify it as a test account. If you ever use a fake name or create a fake profile, if Facebook catches you (which it often does), your account will be suspended!

There are currently two ways to set up test accounts on Facebook. Both have their own environments and restrictions. The first is the old way, and probably will go away soon. The second is a more automated way that requires a little programming knowledge to get set up. It'ss well worth it though, as you can create bulk accounts, relationships between those accounts, and more to set up a true test environment. I recommend getting to know the second approach.

First approach: Manually creating test accounts

The first solution lies in an exception ...