![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/ad-1238450_640-300x200.jpg\")
I am astonished at how hard it is to get information out of Facebook groups.<\/p>\nI am astonished at how hard it is to get information out of Facebook groups.<\/p>\n
The startup of which I am a part has created a Facebook group for dissemination of information of between commercial kitchen operators.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It also benefits from the ubiquity of Facebook–many many folks have it on their phones and get notifications about group activity.<\/p>\n
However, it has the detriment of being a “walled garden”, with the content of the group being unavailable for searchers on the web.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 A human could do that, but I’d like an automated solution. And, other than the Facebook API, I haven’t found many.\u00a0 Zapier (my go to integration choice<\/a>) only recently released\u00a0this as an option<\/a>\u00a0(in the last few months).\u00a0 IFTTT doesn’t have it.\u00a0 There’s no commercial solution that I could find that does this.\u00a0 There are, however, some open source solutions<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Facebook API makes it fairly easy to grab the posts of a group<\/a>, and from the posts, the comments<\/a>, but frankly, I really want a solution that doesn’t require coding up the JSON parsing\/pagination handling\/Oauth access.\u00a0 I just tried the facebook-export tool<\/a> 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: 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-javascript","category-social-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2327"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3127,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2327\/revisions\/3127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}leveldown.target.mk:114: recipe for target 'Release\/obj.target\/leveldown\/src\/batch.o' failed<\/code>). It gives you all your posts as JSON.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"