Facebook Page scraper
Hi,
I'm using "Facebook page posts checker", and I have three issues.
1. I would like to scrape the community of a page and not just the original posts, is there a way to accomplish that?
2. I know the Groups are beta in that scraper nonetheless, you can't limit the group scrape with a date only by quantity, how can I limit by date?
3. Ever since i started using it says the scraper is under maintenance, would that be resolved soon?
Thank you
9 Replies
broad-amaranth•2y ago
The dev will have a closer look over weekend on the facebook actors and this use-case. However "Page Post Checker" actor only supposed to quick check if page was updated, it will not get any deep details.
And dates not supported in any of current actors, end user should filter out dataset for date range he wants.
As for the 'under maintenance' status - seems like there was some /discussions/misunderstanding about some actor changes... We're talking about it internally, should drop this label soon hopefully.
conscious-sapphireOP•2y ago
Thank you for your answer. But the scraper does collect posts, from pages as well as groups.
"Facebook page checker extracts posts until several years from past, reviews and page details. Groups added as beta, less posts expected but with better details."
I copied this from the actor. The Date works perfectly for posts.
Should I use a different scraper?
Thank you
broad-amaranth•2y ago
@Alexey Udovydchenko if you would have a moment - could you please comment on this directly maybe?
wise-white•2y ago
@Ronablu thanks for feedback, follow-up:
1. Support for community page section might be a good lead if you can provide more details about why its valuable as data? I quick check https://www.facebook.com/lovesheepong/community - looks very similar to posts feed, need to evaluate whats the point to support it
2. New version of FB Groups actor is https://apify.com/apify/facebook-groups-scraper and support for date ranges removed because actor doing it by throwing away posts (dataset items) outside of date range and it leads to confusion for some users. Instead current actor saving all scraped posts and further filtering supposed to be done by https://apify.com/lukaskrivka/dedup-datasets actor or other third party tools
3. Likewise, old actor no longer developed and will be deprecated in the future, updated and maintained version is https://apify.com/apify/facebook-groups-scraper
conscious-sapphireOP•2y ago
@Alexey Udovydchenko Thank you for answering.
1. In the community section you can find all of the posts that tagged that page.
https://www.facebook.com/Microsoft/community/?ref=page_internal
This is useful to PR and costumer service departments.
2. As a page scraper this scraper works great and the date range works as well. This is one reason I choose this scraper over the others, the other that I can have page and group scraper together.
3. I didn't fully understand the second answer. doesn't this means a lot more data is scraped, which in turn cost more money?
4. This scraper will be deprecated? I'm in need of a facebook page scraper.
Thank you,
Rona
deep-jade•14mo ago
Hello, have searched discord before posting new and came across this. I want to get an entire group, but break it up by date ranges in case of any failures so we dont have to keep rerunning on the entire group of 10k's of posts. Sounds like from the above date range is not supported anymore as of about 1 year ago. Have their been any updates to that? All I am seeing is the ability to do "newer than" and not "older than"
@cgrove dm me
deep-jade•14mo ago
I want to scrape 100s of thousands of posts from Facebook groups, in the UI i see the limit is capped at 5000. My project is run from the API, but since there is no way to pickup where it leaves off, I want to grab the entire group. Is there a way to progessively grab all posts in a facebook group?
overseas-lavender•14mo ago
Hi @cgrove, due to technical limitations, it is not possible to scrape more than 5k posts.