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
    edited May 3, 2011
    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...

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