New Firefox plug-ins (ArchiveFacebook) causing problems to Zotero

mpahonen

In early April I noticed (after Zotero update) that my database was totally empty. So, I thougt that I had lost thousands of citations. At the same time I noticed that adding new citation to (empty) database was not possible.

So, I tried to recover old database by renaming backup-file .bak to zotero.sqlite . No effect.

BUT, when I disabled Firefox Add-Ons called ArchiveFacebook my Zotero was working again and all reference (the database) were there :-)

Please, let me know the reason for this! Any chance to change Zotero to work with these this ArchiveFacebook-Add-On? (What is BTW the best way to archieve Facebook content??)

(My browser is Firefox 3.6.16 and my PC has Windows Vista).

fbennett

There is apparently a conflict with that addon. It seems that ArchiveFacebook is no longer listed on the Mozilla Addons site, while Zotero is (and is kept up to date). I believe that the Addons listed on the Mozilla site go through a code review process, so your suspicions should probably focus on ArchiveFacebook rather than Zotero.

Probably the simplest thing to do would be to use a different utility for storing Facebook snapshots (such as Zotero ...).

ajlyon

It would be nice to see translators for Facebook, Twitter, and some other similar sites. Highly dynamic sites often fail to be captured effectively by Zotero.

fbennett

Ah, right. Now that you mention it, I looked into this sometime last year, not for Zotero, but to produce a private RSS feed for former students' news updates. What I found was that Facebook pages are populated using one-time URLs that are delivered through complex Javascript transactions -- the site is designed to make this kind of thing extremely difficult, if not impossible.

In the end, I concluded that if they want the data that badly, they can have it; I just check the site once a year or so when I get curious about what people are up to. Nice movie, though, or so I hear.

adamsmith

actually I don't think that's the case - facebook posts have permalinks:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/98.7wfmt/posts/143383602400056

The poster is in a node calld
/div[@class="actorName actorDescription"]

The message is in /span[@class="messageBody"]

Comments are
/div[@class="commentContent"] (or so)

All seems doable - the bigger issue would seem to be how a facebook post should be catalogued...