Where Jetpack get the article:author value?

Things will change a bit in the next Jetpack release, but here is how it works today:

1. By default, Jetpack looks at the post author, and then link to their author archive page, where we’ve set the og:type as profile, and added the necessary information about the author. That is in accordance with the Open Graph Protocol standard: http://ogp.me/#type_profile
   In practice, that means that you’ll see an og:author tag on each post, with a link looking like this: http://site.com/author/fmortara. That link is generated by WordPress itself, it’s the default author page link.
2. If you use Jetpack’s Publicize module, and have connected your personal Facebook account to your site, we’ll add a link to your Facebook profile as the og:author tag. That’s in accordance with Facebook’s recommendations here:
   https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/opengraph/object-type/article#properties

However, we’ve experienced some issues with step 1 above in the past few weeks: Facebook sometimes fails to read the whole link, and only sees /author in the URL. It only keeps that information, and assign these posts to the person owning the /author Facebook profile page:
https://www.facebook.com/author

That’s obviously not something you’d want to see on your site, so we’ll be removing that first step in Jetpack 3.6. You can see the related commit here:
https://github.com/Automattic/jetpack/commit/31964349d57b2ad83bc6ce86b4d80b5cc06f3a8b

How can I change this information?

You can overwrite Jetpack’s Open Graph Meta Tags thanks to the jetpack_open_graph_tags filter. For example, to set up your own link for all posts, you could add the following code in your theme’s functions.php file, or in a functionality plugin:

function jeherve_custom_og_author( $og_tags ) {
	if ( is_singular() ) {
		$og_tags['article:author'] = 'http://jeremy.hu/author/jeherve/';
	}
	return $og_tags;
}
add_filter( 'jetpack_open_graph_tags', 'jeherve_custom_og_author', 11 );

of course you’ll need to replace that URL with your own 🙂

I think the default mode of work of jetpack is a bit useless for best results.

As I said, we’ll remove it in the next Jetpack release. That said, that default mode is the way most Open Graph Plugins work today, and that’s the best way to follow the Open Graph Protocol Standards, as I mentioned earlier. Unfortunately, Facebook moved away from those standards a little while ago.

The article:author link is to Facebook address of site’s Fan page, indipendent from author of article.

Could you let me know your site URL, so I can take a look? This should not happen today, as we only overwrite the default author link if a Facebook Profile is connected. Facebook Fan Pages should not appear there.

Facebook indeed only accepts links to Facebook Profiles. You might get errors in Facebook’s Debugger if you use a link to a Facebook Fan Page instead, and Facebook may start to reject your Publicized posts.

I think is more usefull a link to facebook profile of author, in any condition of post.

That could be problematic for older posts, though. When you connect Publicize to your Facebook account, we can’t be sure that you want to assign that Facebook Profile page to all the previous posts on that site. If you’re sure, you can use the filter I mentioned above to overwrite the author value everywhere on your site.

for other, the link is to site’s fan page
For a new draft, I’ve see the link to page http://www.facebook.com/FANPAGE

Could you post a link to one of those posts, so I can have a look?

If you want it to remain private, you can also contact us via this contact form:
http://jetpack.me/contact-support/