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Getting the good content out of a Facebook group

I am astonished at how hard it is to get information out of Facebook groups.

The startup of which I am a part has created a Facebook group for dissemination of information of between commercial kitchen operators.  This was easier to get started than a forum and has the advantage of everyone being a “real person”, or at least real enough to get a Facebook account.  It also benefits from the ubiquity of Facebook–many many folks have it on their phones and get notifications about group activity.

However, it has the detriment of being a “walled garden”, with the content of the group being unavailable for searchers on the web.  Some might argue that privacy actually is a good thing, because it will encourage folks to be more honest, but really, anything you put on Facebook can be cut and pasted and made public, so I’m not sure I buy that argument.

Regardless, I wanted to find an easy, automated way to take the Facebook group content and pipe it elsewhere, where it could be reified and curated.  A human could do that, but I’d like an automated solution. And, other than the Facebook API, I haven’t found many.  Zapier (my go to integration choice) only recently released this as an option (in the last few months).  IFTTT doesn’t have it.  There’s no commercial solution that I could find that does this.  There are, however, some open source solutions.

The Facebook API makes it fairly easy to grab the posts of a group, and from the posts, the comments, but frankly, I really want a solution that doesn’t require coding up the JSON parsing/pagination handling/Oauth access.  I just tried the facebook-export tool and it seems to work just fine (though I had ended up having to update the leveldown/levelup versions to 1.5/1.3 to get past a compile error: leveldown.target.mk:114: recipe for target 'Release/obj.target/leveldown/src/batch.o' failed). It gives you all your posts as JSON.

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