Rss-bridge: Facebook | Only two status

[Sakarias411]

Hello there,

I am trying to display a Facebook page's public posts as an RSS feed but the script just retrieves

• Only the two last posts
• Page Reviews (You know... stars rating + comment)

Page I am trying to display : EcolePolytechnique
Parameters used : _?action=display&bridge=Facebook&u=EcolePolytechnique&media_type=all&format=Mrss_

What I get :

What I should get : The blue part (as shown in the image) only, with all the page's posts.
I think the reviews are unnecessary and should be removed.

Best regards.

[LogMANOriginal]

Even though this issue was first, it seems to be a duplicate of #706.

Can you please test again with the latest master? This might be fixed by 4a5f190e0e2dd83f89bf60a6c7598d6c64e4a5c3

Regarding the fact that it only returns the last two posts: This is actually limited by the fact that Facebook doesn't provide additional contents in the HTML source we receive via RSS-Bridge. Facebook does lazy loading when scrolling down on their page, which is not possible in RSS-Bridge.

[QmwJlHuSg9pa]

Regarding the amount of posts retrieved: It seems that https://m.facebook.com/<page> returns the last 4 posts. Is there a reason this site is not used as a source?

[LogMANOriginal]

Is there a reason this site is not used as a source?

Probably because the maintainer didn't know about that source (I certainly did not). I reopened this issue, maybe we can figure out if the mobile version is compatible to the bridge features. The mobile version looks much more lightweight and should improve performance as well.

[teromene]

Is there a reason this site is not used as a source?

There is actually: when the bridge was designed, the main concern was captcha solving. The mobile version had way more captchas and was deed useless. But now that there are nearly no more captchas, I think we could think about using it.

[10362227]

they used facebook.com/"username"
facebook.com/pg/"username"/posts will show more posts

[LogMANOriginal]

I understand there is a demand for returning more than two statuses via the Facebook bridge, probably because some profiles are very active, causing the bridge to miss a few items if the cache duration is too high (5 minutes).

@10362227 I have tried using facebook.com/pg/"username"/posts but it also returns two items to me and has different contents.

We also currently have two Facebook bridges (FacebookBridge and FB2Bridge), so maybe we can start by merging those two together, or having one of them removed. However, the two bridges seem to implement two very different solutions which makes this process rather complex.

Any suggestions?

[LogMANOriginal]

A few hours later...

Okay, so I looked into some more details and did some cleaning up in the meantime. Unfortunately it doesn't seem possible to simply load the contents from a different URL, as they'll mostly just display the latest two posts. For anything else you need javascript. Interestingly enough though, groups actually do return the latest 10 posts.

Here are my results:

• facebook.com/pg/username/posts is essentially the same as facebook.com/username
• m.facebook.com/username is much more lightweight and does actually return more posts for some users, but no posts for others, which is no good.

Examples:

Notice: You MUST disable javascript (install an addon to for your favorite browser), or Facebook will automatically redirect to the scripted page!

• https://www.facebook.com/zdf?_fb_noscript=1 (returns 2 posts)
• https://m.facebook.com/zdf (returns no posts)
• https://www.facebook.com/artetv?_fb_noscript=1 (returns 2 posts)
• https://m.facebook.com/artetv (returns 2 posts)

You can try it yourself, your results should be similar to mine.

Technically, there is a "Show All" button, which we could utilize to load about 10 more posts. This would absolutely cause higher traffic for loading additional contents and I'm not sure but this might also get servers blacklisted in the future because the URI is tracked by Facebook.

[LogMANOriginal]

I have tried using facebook.com/pg/"username"/posts but it also returns two items to me and has different contents.

Looks like I was wrong after all. While it looks the same in my browser, RSS-Bridge actually returns more posts. Strange...

Please let me know if the latest change returns more posts for you!

[10362227]

@LogMANOriginal thanks, but too many items, Please limit 5-10 items

[triatic]

Much better for me too.

If the number of items returned is to be reduced I feel this should be controllable by the user.

[10362227]

feedburner was unable to load some rss pages, very strange.
example http://XXX.XXX.XXX/rss/rss-bridge-master/?action=display&bridge=FB2&u=disneymovies&format=Mrss

[triatic]

@10362227 this issue is about the Facebook Bridge, but your URL suggests you are talking about the FB2 Bridge.

[triatic]

@LogMANOriginal the standard Facebook Bridge is now much better now with 20 posts, 2 posts was not enough which is why until now I was using FB2. I suppose FB2 might serve as a good backup if anything breaks with Facebook Bridge in the future, and people need a short or long term alternative, so scrapping it might not be a good idea.

In any case FB2 currently seems to have an issue whereby none of the posts in October are showing, it seems to be cookies issue, so at the moment the Facebook Bridge is the only functional bridge for Facebook anyway.

[LogMANOriginal]

@LogMANOriginal thanks, but too many items, Please limit 5-10 items

Done. Let me know if the latest master works for you by adding &limit=5 to your query.

feedburner was unable to load some rss pages, very strange.
example http://XXX.XXX.XXX/rss/rss-bridge-master/?action=display&bridge=FB2&u=disneymovies&format=Mrss

As @triatic correctly pointed out, you are using FB2 bridge instead of FacebookBridge. Unfortunately we currently have two Facebook bridges available, both of which may fail in certain situations. Please try ?action=display&bridge=Facebook&u=disneymovies&media_type=all&format=Mrss

Please open a new issue if this doesn't work for you.

@LogMANOriginal the standard Facebook Bridge is now much better now with 20 posts, 2 posts was not enough which is why until now I was using FB2. I suppose FB2 might serve as a good backup if anything breaks with Facebook Bridge in the future, and people need a short or long term alternative, so scrapping it might not be a good idea.

In any case FB2 currently seems to have an issue whereby none of the posts in October are showing, it seems to be cookies issue, so at the moment the Facebook Bridge is the only functional bridge for Facebook anyway.

Thanks for the feedback!

If I remember correctly, FB2 came to be because Facebook was continuously doing captchas, which were less problematic using FB2. Then again, this seems to be less problematic nowadays than it was in the past. Maybe we can merge them into one bridge at some point, but that is a separate issue altogether.

I'll be closing this issue now. Thanks again for the positive feedback everyone! :1st_place_medal: