<story><title>Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline</title><url>https://twitter.com/wolfiechristl/status/1071473931784212480</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jordan801</author><text>Anyone who has written a few scrappers knows how brutally ineffective this is. Yelp tried to pull the same thing and it took me about 3 minutes to rectify my &amp;quot;for fun&amp;quot; scraper. It&amp;#x27;s also really not that difficult to write a smart scraper that you say, &amp;quot;Look for these things in this post. However you find them, replicate it for the others&amp;quot;. Which is ultimately what I made my Yelp scraper do.&lt;p&gt;If there&amp;#x27;s a pattern, I will find it, and I will exploit it. &amp;lt;3</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>singron</author><text>It actually seems pretty effective in this case. This uBlock Origin issue has been open for half a year and none of the default lists block the ads: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;uBlockOrigin&amp;#x2F;uAssets&amp;#x2F;issues&amp;#x2F;3367&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;uBlockOrigin&amp;#x2F;uAssets&amp;#x2F;issues&amp;#x2F;3367&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline</title><url>https://twitter.com/wolfiechristl/status/1071473931784212480</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jordan801</author><text>Anyone who has written a few scrappers knows how brutally ineffective this is. Yelp tried to pull the same thing and it took me about 3 minutes to rectify my &amp;quot;for fun&amp;quot; scraper. It&amp;#x27;s also really not that difficult to write a smart scraper that you say, &amp;quot;Look for these things in this post. However you find them, replicate it for the others&amp;quot;. Which is ultimately what I made my Yelp scraper do.&lt;p&gt;If there&amp;#x27;s a pattern, I will find it, and I will exploit it. &amp;lt;3</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>folkhack</author><text>100% true. Have written PLENTY of scrapers and methods like this are ultimately ineffective.&lt;p&gt;Even if you absolutely mangled the HTML&amp;#x2F;selectors&amp;#x2F;DOM&amp;#x2F;etc. I feel you could always have it process screenshots of the interfaces to rip text&amp;#x2F;figure out how to interact etc. If it&amp;#x27;s human readable, it&amp;#x27;s bot readable imo. (but in years of botting it&amp;#x27;s never came to this - I&amp;#x27;ve always been able to figure out how to use the existing DOM&amp;#x2F;selectors to do my work even with anti-bot measures)</text></comment>