The Skepti-Forum Project runs a collection of Facebook discussion groups dedicated to civil, evidence-based discussion of science related issues. The Facebook Archive provides a website for archiving public content and then displaying it to end users via a Microsoft ASP.NET MVC application.

The website frontend is a Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 5 project using Google's AngularJS for exposing the data to end users. This includes:

• / for searching the site via a Google Custom Search Engine (CSE).
• /Admin/Download/ for requesting archives from Facebook using the Archive class library.
• /Sitemap for providing metadata to Google and Bing search engines (via the sitemap.org format).
• /Groups/#/permalink/# for exposing details for individual threads (via the ThreadsController).

The Archive class library provides a data access layer for interacting with the Facebook Graph API. This includes a static Facebook class for accessing a cached instance of a FacebookClient (via the Client property) and a FacebookGroupCollection (via the Groups property). Currently, the data that is downloaded is stored to disk in an /Archives/ folder (excluded from the repository). Within the library, calls to Facebook's Graph API are handled by the Facebook C# SDK.

Note: The Archive project contains a Constants.cs class which must be modified to include the Facebook API Key (via the ClientId property) and App Secret (via the ClientSecret property). If these are not set, the administration tools will throw a NotImplementedException.

The download tool is required for establishing and maintaining the archive of Facebook posts. It can be called via the Admin controller (/Admin/Download), and largely relies on the Archive class library. Out-of-the-box, the Archive class library will download all posts from public Facebook groups that a) the authenticated user is a member of, and b) containing the term 'Skepti-Forum' in their title. The payloads for these requests are then saved by the AdminController to disk, in the format /{GroupId}/{GroupId}_{PostId}.json. It is these files that the frontend web application provides access to through the /Groups/{GroupId}/permalink/{PostId} route (which is consistent with Facebook's own routing conventions).

Note: Facebook recently deprecated the user_groups permission for public apps, except in very specific scenarios. For now, the permission continues to work for unpublished apps. As a result, the download functionality is only accessible to users who are listed as an owner, developer, or tester of the Facebook application.

By default, the download tool will only archive posts from groups that are marked as "Public". For groups marked as "Closed" or "Private", members may have an expectation of privacy, even if join requests are always approved. The tool can be modified by reinstantiating the Facebook.Groups property with an instance of new FacebookGroupCollection(false); which will override the publicOnly configuration element. This should only be done with a clear understanding of your user's privacy expectations.

Note: In the future, we will be extending this project to include an anonymizer routine which will replace name with initials. Until then, we strongly discourage downloading data from "Closed" or "Private" groups.

This tool was developed primarily as an internal application to meet the requirements of the Skepti-Forum Project and, as such, it has not been optimized for public consumption. There are a number of areas of the code that need cleanup, particularly relating to how Facebook access tokens are stored, sent to the server, and used to instantiate the FacebookClient class. While we hope to refactor this process in the future, be aware that the administrative tools have been developed with a "get 'er done" mentality, and not an eye toward reuse. YMMV.

This application is released on the MIT License.