From Facebook Developers Wiki

[edit] Test Accounts for App Developers

One of the hard things about developing on the Facebook Platform has been testing apps. Facebook's Terms of Service require that all accounts be linked to your real identity, so it's not allowed to make fake accounts to test things with. The status quo is the following cycle: developers make test accounts, developers test with those accounts for a little while, our Customer Support team comes across those test accounts and identifies them as fake and disables them, developers are annoyed and frustrated, developers make more test accounts. This is pretty bad.

So, we formalized the concept of test accounts in a way that should be better for everyone. Here's how it works.

To make a test account, register a new account on Facebook as you normally would. Then, when logged in to the test account, go to this URL:
http://www.facebook.com/developers/become_test_account.php

This will mark your account as a test account by adding an affiliation to the Facebook Platform Developer Test Accounts network. As long as the account is affiliated with that network, it will be considered a test account. If you accidentally make a real account a test account, you can remove its test account status by removing the affiliation with the Facebook Platform Developer Test Accounts Network from the Network Settings page.

A few important things to note:

• Test accounts won't be able to see real Facebook users and vice versa. You can make an existing account a test account, but if that account is friends with a real account, each user will disappear from the other's list of friends.
• Our customer support team won't disable test accounts for being fake, but test accounts may be disabled for violating any other reason that a real account would be disabled.
• Only real accounts should be used to administer and create applications. When a Facebook account becomes a test account:
  • That account can no longer use the Facebook Developer application.

Going forward, we'll add other functionality to the test environment – in particular, setting up accounts with large numbers of friend connections and making those available to users is something we hope to do shortly. But we're releasing this feature now to meet the immediate need of developers of a sanctioned way to test applications.

You can suggest ideas for ways to make test accounts better by submitting an enhancement idea into our public bug tracking system here:
http://bugs.developers.facebook.com/enter_bug.cgi?product=Facebook%20Tools%20for%20developers

[edit] Questions

• Plus Addressing: Facebook rejects email addresses with plus signs in them as invalid, e.g. joebloggs+facebook@test.com. Plus addressing is valid, should be allowed, and would eliminate the unique email address problem. More on plus addressing here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_address#Plus_.28or_Minus.29_addressing
  • However, with Google Mail, you can add some dots inside your username. This already gives you a few addresses to use.
• How is it possible to add a tester to an application such that they can test it? Previously, I created fake accounts, befriended them, and listed them as developers. As soon as I turned those accounts to tester accounts and removed them from the list of developers, they no longer had access to the app.
• "you may not list a test account as the developer of an app" - So how are supposed to use the test accounts in dev mode then? Wouldn't it be more sensible to specify that all apps must have a non-test owner? - Wouldn't it be better to disallow publishing apps where the developer is a test account?
• How do I make my test account one of my friends so I can test app invite feature as well as member-to-member communication?
  • Make two test accounts, and set them as friends of each other.
• What about the requirement of separate email addresses for each account? Should we create a new email address for each account we need, or can we eventually expect to see that all of our test accounts could be linked up to one email address (or even to our real account)?
  • http://www.mailexpire.com/ works well for me --Steve Kanter 12:29, 4 October 2007 (PDT)
    • Looks like FB is now blocking email addresses that contain mailexpire.com. I just tried a couple of aliases from mailexpire.com and got the 'invalid email' error message during registration. 27/5/2008.
• In lieu of EVERY problem above... wouldn't it make more sense to follow the practice of several other web service APIs (such as Amazon and PayPal) where a user can create test accounts which are linked directly to their real account. Ideally there would be a 'manage test accounts' page within the Developer app where a developer can add new users. Maybe to make this integrate easier with the Facebook architecture (the sandbox doesn't seem to be a realistic solution), the new test accounts could become extended onto a user's login i.e. say user@email.com created 'testuser' then they could login to Facebook as testuser@user@email.com or some such thing. The biggest problems for many developers would be the first raised question of not being able to add a test account as the developer of an app - so that they won't be able to test the app while it's in developer mode. I think the multiple e-mail issue is also a huge problem. I know personally I've had a lot of trouble trying to make multiple accounts - when I hit submit on the registration form I just get an error telling me to try a different e-mail address. But this is a big step in the right direction. Thanks Facebook. Dustin Fineout 08:30, 4 October 2007 (PDT)
• Currently, it seems like the restriction is against ADDING a test user as a developer - if your fake account is already a developer when you hit the "test user" link, the test account still has access to "developer mode" applications. Is this intended behavior, or a "bug" that is likely to go away in some unannounced revision? Sean Blakey
  • Warning: I tried this and now I cannot access my application any more from any of my accounts (real one nor test ones).
    • What can we do if this happens? All of the applications I have developed have been disabled. Carl Paradis
• What are you guys using as names? 90% of the test accounts I try to create trigger the "Our automated system will not approve this name" error.
  • Try using realistic people names. That's what worked for me. 713407081 14:03, 18 June 2008 (PDT)
• How do you recover your friends back?
• I created an account, added the Developers application, set the account to test. Apparently I don't have any way to add to this account the application I want to test, because it's a developers mode application. I should make it public, but so, is the purpose of having a test account only to be able to register multiple accounts, and still have to use a different email for each of them?
• I like the idea of a test network but could you make it easier by having Facebook create the accounts for us. I would like to submit some type of form that asks. How many accounts do you want? Are they all friends? Then if not I would like a way to show their relationship. 1 and 2 are friends. 2 and 3 are friends. 3 and 4 are friends. 1 and 4 are friends. Then when I hit submit, I get their names, fake email accounts, passwords and all there email comes to my real person account. Thanks
• I don't have a question, but would like to reiterate that these test accounts are basically useless unless you've already released your app. -- I agree with this comment. These test accounts are so limited that it's pointless to do this.

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• Notificaiton Limit for test accounts?

I am using a test account to test my app's notifications logic, and my notifications are getting throttled.

Which is great for real user accounts, but I just want to test my notifications work, and I would like to disable the limit (or get a higher quota) for my test account.

Is there any way to do this?

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