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rugantio / fbcrawl

A Facebook crawler
Apache License 2.0
661 stars 229 forks source link

Add crawling for events? #19

Open littlewine opened 5 years ago

littlewine commented 5 years ago

Is there an option to crawl events out of Facebook? If not, would it be easy to implement? I could assist if there is interest for that.

rugantio commented 5 years ago

At the moment there is no such function but thx for bringing up the idea :) I think that having a dedicated "event" crawler would be useful, I know many people that "use facebook only for events", so it can work as a real time aggregator of interesting events on given pages. Even a simple csv could be enough to replicate (and possibly enhance) the events infos; ultimately having an export in iCal with a nice frontend would be ideal. Also, for pages that host regular events, it would be useful to have the crawler to perform better data science analysis

StefanYohansson commented 5 years ago

I created this based on some needs, hope it helps.

https://github.com/rugantio/fbcrawl/pull/40

Thank you for the project.

littlewine commented 5 years ago

@StefanYohansson is this crawling events from a page, or universally?

edit: just saw the docstring. Would it be easy to extend it to all the events (not restricted to one page)? I can pick it up if there is interest, but a bit of a guidance might be useful!

littlewine commented 5 years ago

I just checked the events crawler, it seems that it's broken somehow. I do not get any events crawled even when there are events on a page. Is there a chance the XPATHS were changed?

StefanYohansson commented 5 years ago

@littlewine I don't even know how to get events universally from facebook. There's an event page or something? (I am not familiar with Facebook)

kaets commented 5 years ago

@StefanYohansson facebook.com/events facebook.com/events/discovery seems to get your location by way of your IP and show you nearby events. However, it looks like mbasic.facebook.com/events/discovery only gives a couple of nearby events, whereas m.facebook.com/events/discovery and facebook.com/events/discovery gives an infinitely-scrollable list of nearby events. It would be a pretty big undertaking to get a list of nearby events, but it would be super useful :)

kaets commented 5 years ago

Also, one more thing I noticed was that you can also get more information about the event by clicking "View Event Details." For instance, you can get a more detailed event description and a count of the number of people going, interested, and who shared the event. I feel like the count of people attending/interested in the event would be important to know.