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Post Filtering / Moderation - Facebook Crawler | Forum

Mike Millaire
Mike Millaire Feb 10 '17
Hey,


Didn't have time to look through the code yet, but I gave your plugin a quick test drive and it seems to be scraping lots of visitor posts alongside actual page updates. This kind of content can be spammy or irrelevant. Is there a way to filter those unwanted posts out easily?

Bkascript
Bkascript Feb 11 '17

Quote from Mike Millaire Hey,


Didn't have time to look through the code yet, but I gave your plugin a quick test drive and it seems to be scraping lots of visitor posts alongside actual page updates. This kind of content can be spammy or irrelevant. Is there a way to filter those unwanted posts out easily?

Thank you for your feedback , i have update to fixed that , can you go to store and download it and update plugin , just download that and replace old source code to your site
Mike Millaire
Mike Millaire Feb 11 '17

Thanks for trying to resolve this, your support is very appreciated.


I see that you added a check for page ID in the cron code, but it doesn't seem to make any difference and the updated plugin continues pulling visitor posts like before.

Here's an example from a random page I just tested:


It looks like this ID check doesn't work as planned for some reason. Unfortunately, I have no idea why as I never worked with Facebook API.

Bkascript
Bkascript Feb 11 '17

Quote from Mike Millaire

Thanks for trying to resolve this, your support is very appreciated.


I see that you added a check for page ID in the cron code, but it doesn't seem to make any difference and the updated plugin continues pulling visitor posts like before.

Here's an example from a random page I just tested:


It looks like this ID check doesn't work as planned for some reason. Unfortunately, I have no idea why as I never worked with Facebook API.

are you sure ? can you check again for me ? because i think it is old cronjob results . 


if you want check correct 100% so need unistall old version and install newest version

Mike Millaire
Mike Millaire Feb 13 '17

Hi again.

I reproduced the behaviour with the newest version of your plugin on a freshly-installed, clean instance of Oxwall 1.8.4 with no third party plugins other than the dependencies (photo & newsfeed). I used the same facebook page for testing and you can see some of the same visitor posts are being crawled:

As I said I'm no expert at Facebook API and how it works, but maybe for some reason it returns page ID for the visitor posts and they bypass the filter? I see no other explanation :/

Bkascript
Bkascript Feb 14 '17
Strange . are you sure you didn't post that to your page ? or if Facebook API return this post with page id so we can filter that , but that is special , i also add many page and haven't that issue
The Forum post is edited by Bkascript Feb 14 '17
Mike Millaire
Mike Millaire Feb 14 '17

Yeah, I know it's very strange. I never understand why Facebook can't keep things more simple, like Twitter :)


I'll try to explain the situation in more detail, so that you can understand everything:

There are two different settings for visitor posts on a Facebook page available to page admins. The owner of each Facebook page can choose if they 1) allow visitor posts to be displayed, or 2) disallow visitor posts. It's explained in Facebook Pages FAQ.


Now, for example, the White House doesn't allow vistor posts, and there are no issues with this page. But many pages allow visitor posts, like for example Amazing Planet which I picked randomly for testing. I don't own this page, so I can't choose the settings to disallow visitor posts, and whatever people post to the page is displayed on it. Admins on some pages take the time to preview and moderate those visitor posts, but often they don't care and display everything.


If you look at the Amazing Planet page, you can see that there is a Visitor Posts (or similar in your language) box on the right side panel, which is not present on the White House page. I think you may have used only pages which don't allow visitor posts, or pages that didn't receive any posts from visitors yet. If a page allows visitor posts but doesn't have any, they will have an empty Visitor Posts box which looks like this:




To reproduce the issue, you can look at the pages you use and see if any has a Visitor Posts box or use any other page that allows visitor posts (for example Amazing Planet). You will see that the contents of the Visitor Posts box are crawled just like official page posts and will be reposted to your site, effectively allowing anyone with a Facebook account to post on your site without authorization.


Ideally, your crawler plugin should never crawl the Visitor Posts section, because if someone discovers this security breach, they can exploit it to spam your site with ads, offensive photos, malicious hack links etc. This is especially undesired on premium membership sites, where people are paying for access and demand highest quality content.


Until you can find a reliable way to eliminate visitor posts, I suggest adding the following warning to your plugin:


Do not use the plugin with Facebook pages which allow visitor posts because of potential security risk.


I think that even without this filter your plugin is really great, but people should be advised to take special care when selecting pages, otherwise they risk dangerous content being posted to their sites.


Also, I've seen that you have a similar plugin for Wordpress on offer. It would be a good idea to add this warning to it too, if it uses the same crawling algorithms.

The Forum post is edited by Mike Millaire Feb 14 '17
Bkascript
Bkascript Feb 15 '17
thank you so much , i will think about that
James Williams
James Williams Aug 21 '17
Hello, I recently purchased your plugin. I am having the same problem where it is pulling visitor posts into my site. I dont want visitor posts. I only want the post from the owner of the page. Please tell me you haven't given up on fixing the problem. I am having to manually delete all these visitor posts daily and it is a pain. please please fix it. 
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Dedi Galih Nov 22 '17
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