Contributing to this repo

[nagi1]

Hello @moda20 I tried to look up your email to contact but didn't find it so I had to open this issue.

Thank you for rescuing this repo from being abandoned.

I have been using it for 4 days and started to like it already but with a few catches, a necessary features and enhancements needs to be implemented to mention few:

• Add ensureAscii=False to the json.dump function to support other languages like Arabic.
• Add proper throttle mechanism (very important) to prevent our accounts from getting banned.
• Add multiple ways to extract missing information like (username, comments)
• Deprecate write_posts_to_csv function because it would get your account banned in no time (happened to me).
• Add proper resume mechanism (important) to allow the scraping session to continue over multiple days.
• Support multiple cookies to rotate accounts (avoid ban)
• Support multiple proxies out of the box
• MAKE mbasic.facebook.com the main way to scrape.
• Implement a way to rotate between the multiple accounts (cookies), proxies and also proper throttling to ensure maximum scraping without getting banned at all.

These enhancements discovered when I tried to scrape a one groupe I think there's a lot to discover.

Now, a little introduction to myself I'm a PHP Developer for more than +8 years and Python is not my main thing but I can navigate my way around it.

I'm welling to contribute and dedicate some time to improve and enhance this project and keep it a life.

Would you please provide some guidance on how to get started contributing, how to know what element to scrape and so on.. and keep in mind that I'm partially new to python but I have good programming knowledge.

Waiting to hear from you.

[moda20]

@nagi1 Thanks for the interest, i really find it useful to have this repo updated as it does help starters and people who need just a little bit of information but is not enough to get into facebook's API pricing.

for contribution, i will be posting a contribution guide with a always updating task list, i might use some external tools and bots to capture issues and arrange them for procedural fixing. i will leave a comment here when that is ready.

But there ar something that i think are out of scope of this repo and i wouldn't include them here :

• supporting cookies/account rotation, since this will be a clear sidestepping of facebook's guidelines on circumventing their account protection
• supporting proxy rotation, this is also a circumvention of facebook's rules and might result in this repo being taken down even though that was never it's goal

here are some points that i would include but in a more tamed way :

• automatic throttling when making a huge number of requests. i would include this to reduce the sudden ban on people just testing the repo without being knowledgeable about the facebook guildelines. I would also include a way to change that throttling based on a quick configuration for more advanced utilities
• scraping sessions : i wouldn't include these as fully featured with tracking and all, but just the ability to save the scraping progress in a file and adding specific start and end pages (posts list) for scrapping functions. ( for groups and pages ) Then, users will have to manually connect both to create their own resumable sessions

It is very important to me that the repo stays up for everyone to try and not be used to fully circumvent facebook's guidelines.

[nagi1]

Okay got it, Let's stick to Facebook's guidelines for now.

I'll be waiting for the contribution guide to help me and other getting started contributing soon.