Importing all FB status without privacy considerations

We're looking into this. At one point, I believe, Facebook would only return the public posts by default. A special setting was required to ask for private posts too, which we didn't do. So, we should only pull in public posts. It's always possible that's changed and we missed it though.

We definitely agree that only public posts should be fetched. We'll let you know what we find, but it may be a few days before we get an answer to you.

Thanks for the tip,
Alex

Sougatab,
Sorry to say, but not yet. This, and a few other JomSocial investigation issues, are high on our investigation list for early next week. We should hopefully have some more information and either a code modification or new version available to address this next week. That's the goal assuming we can find a good solution. From initial investigation, it looks very reasonable to not pull in private posts, but I just can't guarantee it yet.

Thanks for your patience,
Alex

Wanted to circle back to this post. We've been doing a bit of investigation, and getting the privacy information is possible, but in a very weird way. Basically, the "statuses" field from Facebook does not show the privacy value of any of the user's status. Quite annoying.

However, if we grab the user's "feed", we can see their status posts as well as the privacy of each of those statuses. However, there can be hundreds of posts in a user's feed, so we'd need to sift through all of them to find the last feed item that was a) a status and b) set to be public. We are looking into doing this, but it's a bit more effort than we were expecting. Additionally, we need to take loading time into account as this could slow down the registration process a bit depending on how far back we have to go to fetch the right 'last' status. Alternatively, we could just take the first 25 feed items (what is returned by default) and only use one from there, if we find it. If not, the user's status would not be imported.

It's a weighing game of a few different problems, and we're trying to work out the best. Until now, this issue hasn't been brought up. Additionally, JomSocial's built-in Facebook functionality imports statuses the same way (regardless of the FB privacy setting). So this seems to be the commonly accepted approach, for better or worse.

Again, we're still looking into the best solution. If you have feedback on the ideas above, I'd love to hear them. This won't be as quick a fix as I originally hoped though.

Thanks,
Alex