someone’s never used a good api. like mastodon
That’s why I use geddit
I scrape with bash lord help me.
as a windows user i say kindly on our behalf thank you for pushing the envelope ✉
there’s literally dozens of us!
or maybe just 2 idk
you scrape WITH BASH?
Awk all the things!
pipe sed pipe grep pipe tr pipe grep… I would say I am a bit of a plumber
It’s all fun and games until you have to support all this shit and it breaks weekly!
That being said, I do miss the simplicity of maintaining selenium projects for work
Let’s see what WEI (if implemented ) will do with the scrapers. The future doesn’t look promising.
What’s that?
A google/chrome proposal for browser verification, i.e. killing addons and custom browsers.
Nice name, beat me to it
ROFL, Chad only thinks that shit works
Everyone loves the idea of scraping, no one likes maintaining scrapers that break once a week because the CSS or HTML changed.
Or in the case of wikipedia, every table on successive pages for sequential data is formatted differently.
I loved scraping until my ip was blocked for botting lol. I know there’s ways around it it’s just work though
I successfully scraped millions of Amazon product listings simply by routing through TOR and cycling the exit node every 10 seconds.
That’s a good idea right there, I like that
lmao, yeah, get all the exit nodes banned from amazon.
That’s the neat thing, it wouldn’t because traffic only spikes for 10s on any particular node. It perfectly blends into the background noise.
Queue Office Space style error and scrape for 10 hours on each node.
This guy scrapes
You guys use IP’s?
I’m coding baby’s first bot over here lol, I could probably do better
Token ring for me baybeee
spite can be a great motivator, though
I feel this
This one. One of the best motivators. Sense of satisfaction when you get it working and you feel unstoppable (until the next subtle changes happens anyway)
Just use AI to make changes ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Here take these: \\
¯_(ツ)_/¯\\ Thanks
Fuck, I think I’ve been doing it wrong and this meme gave me more things to learn than any YouTube video has
Memes have always been superior to YouTube videos
So uh…as someone who’s currently trying to scrape the web for email addresses to add to my potential client list … where do I start researching this?
Step one will be learning to code in any language. Step two is using a library to help with it. HtmlAgilityPack has always been there for me. Don’t use regex.
Virgin library user vs. Chad regex dev
Start looking into selenium, probably in Python. It’s one of the easier to understand forms of scraping. It’s mainly used to web testing, though you can definitely use it for less… nice purposes.
I really hope Libreddit switches to scraping, the “Error: Too many request” thing is so annoying, I have to click the redirect button in Libredirect like 20 times until I can actually see a post.
Still a better experience than Reddits official site tho.
Just a heads up for companies thinking it’s wrong to scrap: if you don’t want info to be scraped, don’t put it on the internet.
But, but, norobots.txt!
Chad doesn’t care!
uses curl manually instead
Let me introduce you to WooB (formerly WEBooB).
Why on earth would they have changed that. WEBooB is a way better name.
But it’s got boob in it.
Hold on, I thought it was supposed to be realism on the virgin’s behalf and ridiculous nonsense on the chad behalf:
All I see is realism on both sides lol
Sorry, I’m ignorant in this matter. Why exactly would you want to scrape websites aside from collecting data for ML? What kind of irreplaceable API are you using? Someone please educate me here.
API might cost a lot of money for the amount of requests you want to send. API may not include some fields in the data you want. API is rate limited, scraping might not be. API requires agreement to usage terms, scraping does not (though the recent LinkedIn scraping case might weaken that argument.)
My understanding is that the result of the LinkedIn case is that you can scrape data that you have permission to view but not to access data that you were not intended to. The end result that ClickWrap agreements are unenforceable.
This kinda reminds me of pirating vs paying. Using api = you know it will always be the same structure and you will get the data you asked for. Otherwise you will be notified unless they version their api. There is usual good documentation. You can always ask for help.
Scraping = you need to scout the whole website yourself. you need to keep up to date with the the websites structure and to make sure they haven’t added ways to block bots (scraping). Error handling is a lot more intense on your end, like missing content, hidden content, query for data. the website may not follow the same standards/structuree throughout the website so you need to have checks for when to use x to get y. The data may need multiple request because they do not show for example all the user settings on one page but in an api call they would or it is a ajax page and you need to run Javascript scripts and click on buttons that may change id, class or text info and they may load data when you do x with Javascript so you need to emulate the webpage.
So my guess is that scraping is used most often when you only need to fetch simple data structures and you are fine with cleaning up the data afterwards. Like all the text/images on a page, checking if a page has been updated or just save the whole page like wayback machine.
As someone who used to scrape government websites for a living (with permission from them cause they’d rather us break their single 100yr old server than give us a csv), I can confirm that maintaining scraping scripts is a huge pain in the ass.
Ooof, i am glad you don’t have to do it anymore. I have a customer who is in the same situation. The company with the site were also ok with it (it was a running joke “this [bot] is our fastest user”) but it was very sketchy because you had to login as someone to run the bot. thankfully did they always tell us when they made changes so we never had to be surprised.
So, where can I find the Chad scrapper for reddit? They definitely have made it harder to track admin shadow ban and removal shenanigans, specially because sites like reveddit have decided to play ball as if reddit was acting in good faith in the first place.
If you wanted a chad scraper, look at Pushshift. Reveddit relied on it before Reddit got it taken down.
