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For my application/crawlers I collect lots of data which leads to exceeding the rate limit very often. I crawl News-Pages and stuff like that so the Token doesn´t need any permissions like posting stuff.

When using the Graph Explorer you can create an User Access Token(lasts 1-2 hours before expiring). You can create as many as you want so I thought it may be possible to abuse this and overcome the rate limit. I tested it and it somehow worked. Did like 6000 API calls with 2 Tokens in under an hour.

Questions:

  1. Did someone else try this already? If so, did Facebook notice and shut down the Account?
  2. Is it possible to request a new User Token from the Graph Explorer via Code or something else like a virtual machine running with an mouse makro to generate new Tokens every ~30mins?
  • Generating new user tokens for the same user won’t help you anyway ... the limits are based on how many active users your app has. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/advanced/rate-limiting _“Did like 6000 API calls with 2 Tokens in under an hour”_ - smaller apps do not get limited immediately, so don’t think this was a reliable test scenario. If your app doesn’t have the user base to justify that it gets more resources assigned - then making less requests is the only actual option in the long run. – CBroe Aug 22 '17 at 11:13
  • ..."abuse this and overcome the rate limit" - and you don´t think that there is something wrong with this? ;) - limits are there for a reason, don´t try to circumvent those mechanics. no one here will be able to tell you if your account may get shut down or not, only facebook can. about getting a user token via code: that is of course not possible. – andyrandy Aug 22 '17 at 11:14

1 Answers1

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  1. Yes. Yes :) It can go til banning the account or the IP from which the requests are made.
  2. Access Tokens can be obtained by code and you can create more and make some balancing between them combined with different proxies you request through.

HOWEVER I recommend you to use the Facebook ways and respect their politics.

bluehipy
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    "Access Tokens can be obtained by code" - that is not correct, you cannot get a user token (which is what he wanted) by code, you always need user interaction. you can only get an app token by code (it´s just a combination of app id and app secret). – andyrandy Aug 22 '17 at 11:34
  • I didn't say user, I said access token :) but you are correct. – bluehipy Aug 22 '17 at 11:36
  • Uhh... I better stop calling the API too often then. Thanks for your quick answer. :) –  Aug 22 '17 at 11:38
  • If you understand the limits, I am sure there are solutions. Balancing between tokens, balancing between ip's, latency of crawling, distributing part of the crawling on client side. It depends on every other case :) – bluehipy Aug 22 '17 at 11:44
  • HE said user token, not you ;) - anyway, don´t start with shady stuff like that. be a honest developer and respect limits. – andyrandy Aug 22 '17 at 12:30