Do I have to log in to capture Facebook content?
Generally, yes. Almost all content on Facebook will require you to be signed into an account to view it. If you do not want to use your personal account, check with your firm to see if you have a generic or “Examiner” account that they use to view and collect Facebook pages. If they don’t, see our article on creating examiner accounts.
Facebook freezes when I try to collect the page.
Facebook freezing or taking a very long time to scroll is due to two things:
- Data loading limitations by Facebook; and
- All browsers—including Page Vault Browser—have limits on how much content they can load at once. If the user posts very frequently, there simply may be too much content to load at one time in the browser.
Here are some ways we have found to work around these issues.
1. Disable “video autoplay” in Facebook settings.
By default, Facebook will automatically play videos posted on a user’s timeline. Video autoplay significantly slows down collections and drastically increases resource use, which can cause the browser to crash. For the best capture experience, please make sure Facebook video autoplay is turned off.
Click on one of the + signs below for instructions.
- Navigate to Facebook and log in (the option will not be available if you are not on a Facebook page). Click on the hamburger menu in the right corner of the capture menu bar. A menu will appear; select “Turn off video auto-play…”
- A dialog box will appear to confirm that you want to have Page Vault turn off video auto-play for you. Click yes.
- A new tab will open, navigate to your Facebook settings, and turn auto-play off for you. You can now proceed with your Facebook captures.
- Navigate to Facebook settings (in the far left corner of the Facebook menu bar). Select Videos from the left menu options (at the very bottom)
- For Auto-Play videos, select “Off” from the drop-down menu
2. Break the Timeline into smaller timeframes to reduce the amount of content loaded
All browsers—including Page Vault Browser—have limits on how much content they can load at once. If the user posts very frequently, there simply may be too much content to load at one time in the browser.
In these cases, we recommend breaking the timeline down into smaller chunks for the browser to capture. Please see the article on breaking down timelines here.
Alternatively, let Page Vault capture it for you with Page Vault On Demand.
If you’d prefer to have experienced capture professionals make the capture for you, Page Vault can help. Quotes are free and require no commitment.
To receive a quote, simply submit an On-Demand Quote Request form with the URL you are trying to capture and we’ll send you a quote to have our staff make the capture.
During the scrape step in a post-by-post capture, I noticed that the scrape doesn’t complete or keeps looping back to more recent posts. How do I get my list of posts?
Page Vault’s Post-by-Post feature utilizes Facebook’s mobile version in order to gather all individual posts on a Facebook timeline. There are a couple of times when the mobile version of Facebook seems to exhibit unusual behavior and can’t complete the scrape:
- Extremely large profiles: if a profile has more than 6,000 posts, the mobile website can have difficulty scrolling all the way to the end of the profile to get all the links.
- Profiles with a lot of posts in a short time period: if a person posts several times a day, we have seen that Facebook has issues loading all the posts, even in a fairly recent timeframe.
We don’t know why this happens, but in these cases Facebook seems to stop loading new content and pushes the viewer back up in the timeline. This then can result in our algorithm not detecting that the scrape is “done” and/or in scraping the URL of the same posts over and over.
Step 1: Stop the scrape
If you notice that the scrape won’t complete or is jumping back to more recent posts, hit the “Stop” button in the upper left corner of the Browser.
You will get a prompt asking if you would like to save what has been scraped so far; select “Email Scrape Results.”
Step 2: Find a reliable ‘end’ date in the emailed scrape
When you open the scrape, scroll to the bottom of the list and try several of the last 50 or so links in any browser to see the dates. Wherever you determine the true end of your scrape to be, delete any possibly repeated URLs and note the date.
If you noticed that the scrape was jumping back to earlier time periods, note that you may have several duplicate URLs in your scrape. Unfortunately, Facebook adds unique IDs to the end of all URLs, so deduping the list in Excel does not remove any URLs.
Step 3: Use the Facebook date filter and continue your scrape
Using Facebook’s ‘date’ filter at the top of the timeline, select the date noted as the end of your scrape. We suggest including the last date to ensure Facebook doesn’t potentially skip content on the last date you found.
Then run the scrape again to get the post URLs for the remainder of the timeline. Full instructions can be found on this help page.
When reviewing my Facebook timeline capture using Post-by-Post, there are a bunch of duplicate posts. What happened?
Page Vault’s Post-by-Post feature utilizes Facebook’s mobile version in order to gather all individual posts on a Facebook timeline. There are a couple of times when the mobile version of Facebook seems to exhibit unusual behavior and starts loading posts previously shown on the timeline:
- Extremely large profiles: if a profile has more than 6,000 posts, the mobile website can have difficulty scrolling all the way to the end of the profile to get all the links.
- Profiles with a lot of posts in a short time period: if a person posts several times a day, we have seen that Facebook has issues loading all the posts, even in a fairly recent timeframe.
We don’t know why this happens, but in these cases Facebook seems to stop loading new content and pushes the viewer back up in the timeline. Unfortunately, Facebook adds unique IDs to the end of all URLs, so our algorithm does not catch that the posts are duplicates.
If you notice duplicate posts were captured, it’s possible that the Page Vault scrape did not get to the end of the timeline. To capture the remaining posts, we suggest the following:
Step 1: Find a reliable ‘end’ date where you do not see any duplicate posts
Wherever you determine the end of unique posts are, open that capture and note the date of the post.
Step 2: Use the Facebook date filter and Page Vault’s Desktop Scrape feature
Using Facebook’s ‘date’ filter at the top of the timeline, select the date noted as the last post you collected. We suggest including the last date to ensure Facebook doesn’t potentially skip content on the last date you found.
Then run the scrape again to get the post URLs for the remainder of the timeline. Full instructions can be found on this help page.