Expand All Facebook Responses

Update for 2023+

This no longer works. This tool stopped working sometime early in 2023, and I will no longer be maintaining it. It kinda-sorta still works (better on old / legacy threads), and I’ll leave it up indefinitely. It has stopped working due to Facebook changes that, as a human, make no sense to me and have finally caused me to ignore Facebook (going on six months now).

Old introduction

I have written a JavaScript bookmarklet that expands all comments and replies in Facebook posts. This applies only to the full version of the Facebook website (e.g., www.facebook.com) and not to other web versions (e.g., m.facebook.com, touch.facebook.com) or to versions of the mobile app.

Bookmarklets are not the prettiest or best-understood things in the world, but I’m making it available in case people want to use it.

To install or update the bookmarklet, click here to bring up a page with the bookmarklet in it, along with some simple instructions.

Also see my Scroll All bookmarklet.

2021-02-17: I put this in GitHub.

What does this help with?

This expands Facebook posts so that you can see/read all comments and replies from top to bottom without clicking. This is how I use it, and I use it only on individual posts with usually many fewer than 100 comments and replies.

Others use this to expand multiple posts prior to archiving them. That wasn’t my original usage model and can hit Facebook limitations on how much it will retrieve (plus, it gets slower the longer it runs), but it’s still better than manually clicking.

To isolate a single post to a browser tab, ctrl-click on the post’s time stamp link, which is a permalink URL.

Warnings

If you need to 100% guarantee this bookmarklet does not click on something it shouldn’t, your only option is to avoid it altogether.

This is a bookmarklet and can only do what you can do, as you. There’s always the risk of clicking on something that wasn’t intended, especially if the code I write now decides to click on something that becomes something else in the future. This is what happened in 2020 with the translation links: they became indistinguishable from the like links (and the untranslate links, and the remove preview links). It became easier to remove the translation feature from the bookmarklet than claim to be able to figure out to not click the like link.

I would characterize the latest changes as follows: in some cases, where it used to be possible to select a list of links that should be clicked, now that list needs to be filtered by what should not be clicked. Unfortunately, that list of what not to click is probably incomplete. I found many cases to avoid, but others might find other cases.

This bookmarklet will not traipse down a multistep procedure, such as submitting a comment or sharing something. Check your Facebook activity log—you can likely undo any action taken. I myself would probably commit harakiri if I found out I had acted on a Trump post I was lurking on and could not undo it.

2021-01-20 notes

When I originally wrote this bookmarklet in 2014, I could hardly believe it kept working with no changes. I sat on it for about one year with no changes to Facebook before publishing it. Now in early 2021, Facebook changes every day in such a way that breaks this bookmarklet. The daily UI changes are gratuitous and serve no visual purpose.

The daily Facebook change involves an image ribbon and the CSS used to display an image from the ribbon. It all changes under the covers daily, yet there’s no visual change. I thought I’d be able to fix the problem by programmatically analyzing the CSS on-the-fly but no, both the CSS rule name and the CSS rule itself change (every day), for no actual purpose. There doesn’t seem to be a way to programmatically determine the CSS rule name from anything fixed. Plus, parsing CSS across browsers seems to have insurmountable security restrictions.

Up to this point, I managed to keep this completely independent of the display language, meaning you could choose any of the 112 languages supported by Facebook and this tool would work. I did this by keying only off the CSS and DOM structure.

This has changed now that Facebook changes CSS names and definitions daily. I’ve resorted—in only one case—to parsing display text. Of the possible 112 languages, I’ve added support for 34 or so. Maybe eventually I’ll link to a list of supported languages so it’s clearer. Part of the problem is that now, if Facebook changes the translation of the text I’m using, including fixing problems, it will break the bookmarklet.

The failure when a language is not supported is not terrible; under certain conditions, the bookmarklet won’t click a link that retrieves more replies. I think I’ve eliminated the problem with expand / collapse loops (using code), and only some threads won’t be fully expanded.

It only takes 5 – 10 minutes to add support for a language (not long). Facebook supports 112 languages (supporting them all would take days). I’m happy adding individual languages, but I plan to do that only if I hear of them (i.e., upon request).

2020-11-30 update

I made a difficult decision today to make a change based on Facebook’s incessant changing and breaking this tool (collapse/expand looping). The change is intended to prevent loops, but it is at the cost of an occasional (rare, I hope) incomplete expansion.

There will be just as much maintenance, except it will be to click on something that should be clicked on rather than to avoid clicking on something that shouldn’t be clicked on. When it breaks every few days, it will cause some (hopefully) rare expansions to be incomplete rather than to get stuck in infinite loops.

I’m also hoping to address the problem of leapfrogging, where certain locales are greater-than-one Facebook builds ahead of me, so they never benefit from the changes I make, as I’m always a few builds back.

Details of what this does

Output is logged to both a temporary visual text area and to the browser console. The text area goes away when it’s done, so if you want to see a record of what happened after-the-fact, you’ll need to hit F12 and open the browser console. When the script completes, it logs a numerical total of all responses being displayed. New log text goes to the top rather than the bottom.

The bookmarklet clicks on links to get more responses. It clicks and waits for the new content, which is recursively checked for new links. After all the responses are obtained, it clicks any and all See More links.

It finds links to click by querying on CSS style names and is thus cultural language independent and should work with Facebook set to display in any language, with the exception of:

Before expansion begins, comment filtering is checked and, if needed, changed to All comments. This is starting as an English-only feature; additional languages added upon request. Messing with comment filtering is optional (see bookmarklet settings).

Please don’t do this

This isn’t recommended on posts that have many thousands of throw-away comments:

  1. You probably aren’t really interested in that many throw-away comments.
  2. It gets slower and slower as more comments are pulled over, which I think is more of a browser thing than a Facebook thing.

If you want to stop the bookmarklet, hit ESC if ESC doesn’t conflict with what you are doing, or click the bookmarklet again. If you run it again, it will pick up where it left off (effectively, not literally).

Bookmarklet settings (new)

This section is new as of 2019-03-14.

Please be aware that modifying settings for this bookmarklet is weird and backwards, but bookmarklets are themselves a little weird. To modify the settings, you must run the bookmarklet from Facebook; the settings UI comes up at the end by pressing ‘s’ sometime during its run; changes you make are for next time, not this time, if that makes sense.

You can customize the bookmarklet from any Facebook page, but if you want to ensure that it finds nothing to expand, you can run it on a Facebook page with no posts, such as https://www.facebook.com/find-friends/browser/.

The UI settings will not persist across browser sessions if you are incognito/private or running Tor’s Firefox browser (see next section).

If you use this UI, you can no longer have multiple Expand All bookmarklets with different settings (see next section).

Customizing the bookmarklet (old)

This section is old as of 2019-03-14. I’m leaving it here in case their are fanatics who either use Facebook incognito/privately or use Tor’s Firefox browser.

You can customize what the bookmarklet does. You can install multiple bookmarklets, each with a different customization.

When you edit the bookmark (Properties in Firefox), you will see near the very beginning todo=6. You can change the numerical value. With this value, you control four bits of instruction:

  • 1: not used anymore
  • 2: expand comments
  • 4: expand replies
  • 8: not used anymore
  • 16: do not ensure comment filter (if it exists) is set to All comments

In combination, there are 8 possible values. Some examples, starting with a value of 6:

  • Subtract 4 to not expand replies
  • Add 16 to not change any comment filters

Note that I only regularly use (hence, test) the default value.

Why did I do this?

I looked around to see if someone else had done something like this already, and of course I might have missed something, but it became apparent to me that it would be easier to do this myself than to keep looking for something that actually worked (everything I tried did not work).

Warnings and notes

  • This works today based on how Facebook is rendered in HTML today. It might break tomorrow, and I might not be able to fix it.
  • The script doesn’t parse display text.
  • You can run the bookmarklet multiple times. Sometimes it helps to do this if Facebook is slow and timeouts result in an incomplete expansion.
  • If you want to see the bookmarklet’s JavaScript in a readable format, copy-and-paste it into a beautifier such as jsbeautifier.org. In fact, if you know JavaScript, you might want to do this to boost your confidence that I am not trying to hack you with some malicious script.

Troubleshooting

Make sure you are using the latest bookmarklet. Let me know what language you use Facebook in and which browser family you use.

If this bookmarklet used to work and stopped working, chances are Facebook has changed, and I need to change the bookmarklet. I might notice the breakage myself, but it probably won’t hurt to let me know about it. Changes I’ve made are listed here.

As we learned in 2018, Facebook changes can roll out over a period of a few months. I’m in Silicon Valley (Santa Clara, California, U.S.A.), and my guess is that I can be the last to see changes (and thus, problems), as Facebook seems to use less-trafficked areas as beta sites.

If you’ve never seen it work in a situation:

If it doesn’t work for a public Facebook post that you can reveal without a violation of your privacy, send me or post a comment here with the permalink URL in it, and I will look at it.

If it works except for some non-public posts, chances are I won’t have be able to observe what makes it special and therefore won’t be able to fix it. I might be able to reproduce a problem in my own private context, depending on having the problem adequately described.

  • Bear in mind that this just automates clicking that you would otherwise do. Manually click on what is not working, and assess the situation from there.
  • You can run this bookmark multiple times without penalty. Sometimes doing so can reveal a clue, especially interspersed with your own clicking.
  • I consider myself a regular Facebook user. If there’s something unusual or nonstandard about your situation, feel free to elaborate. For example, I have no idea how to create, see, or show a “hidden comment.”
  • Facebook has limitations. Please read the section titled “Please don’t do this.”
  • It often doesn’t matter how brilliant you are at capturing the problem (e.g., with screenshots). If I can’t reproduce the problem, I probably can’t fix it or test any fix now and in the future.


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Comments

500 responses to “Expand All Facebook Responses”

  1. Mateja Avatar
    Mateja

    Thank you so much! That’s a huge time saver. 🙂

  2. Interpre Tasyo Avatar
    Interpre Tasyo

    Hi, can you show how will I add so that I will like all the comments?

    1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
      Jens-Ingo Farley

      It’s not realistic, plus I can’t do it with a good conscience.

  3. Interpre Tasyo Avatar
    Interpre Tasyo

    what if a randomize liking of comment? so that it will not be all.

    1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
      Jens-Ingo Farley

      The only way I could guarantee something works is if I try it, test it, and maintain it into the future (Facebook will change). I changed this bookmarklet about 12 times in the last month because of Facebook changes. I’m not ready to sign up for maintaining a dangerous feature that I would never use.

  4. Interpre Tasyo Avatar
    Interpre Tasyo

    Ok, thanks for your insight

  5. Jeff McCormick Avatar
    Jeff McCormick

    The bookmarklet works great for me, thank you!

    I do have a question that I’m not sure anyone can answer, but figured I’d ask. With classic FB, on a profile timeline there are dropdown menus to select a month/year at the top, and allows you to jump to dates on a timeline. With new FB, these are gone. I frequently use this function to jump to past months or years on timelines, is there a way to do this with the new layout?

    1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
      Jens-Ingo Farley

      If you go to your Activity Log, then Filter, you can filter your activity by year or by many available attributes. That sounds like it might approximate what you’re looking for. The main challenge for the day might be finding your Activity Log.

      1. Jeff McCormick Avatar
        Jeff McCormick

        I see, appreciate the insight! I’d also be looking for a way to do this on other profiles though, that’s the main thing. I’m an investigator so being able to quickly find a specific date on a profile is important.

        1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
          Jens-Ingo Farley

          You can search other people’s profiles (by year, not by a specific date or date range that I see). The hourglass icon (on a profile page) pops up a simple form that looks useless, but if you continue, it will let you filter.

          1. Jeff McCormick Avatar
            Jeff McCormick

            I see, seems like I do have to input something in the search bar for it to work though, hopefully I can find a way to just display every public post from a specific year. I’ll have to keep fiddling with the new layout, I appreciate your input!

  6. Brian T Avatar
    Brian T

    I’m getting the infinite loop of collapse/expand again, which I see is something that seems to pop up every few days. I imagine this is a quick fix, but I don’t have old versions of the bookmarklet to compare.

    1. Brian T Avatar
      Brian T

      While I’m here, any changes I make to the settings doesn’t seem to be saved. I was trying to see if I could have it skip the expand-replies part, and just loop through all the “See More…” links only.

      1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
        Jens-Ingo Farley

        Fixed just now. I accidentally broke it on 2020-07-17, which goes to show you how often I change my settings (i.e., never).

    2. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
      Jens-Ingo Farley

      Fixed just now.

      1. Brian T Avatar
        Brian T

        Fantastic! Tested on a few posts that caused the loop, and all of them expand properly now. Saving changes to settings also works. I really appreciate all the work you’re putting into this!

  7. Bill Davis Avatar

    How can I can use this on Chromium-based BRAVE browser?

    1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
      Jens-Ingo Farley

      It should just work, same as Google Chrome (and Microsoft Edge). I just tried Version 1.13.82 Chromium: 85.0.4183.83, and it didn’t have any noticeable problems.

    2. Brian T Avatar
      Brian T

      Works great for me in Brave on Windows 10. Drag ‘n drop the bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar, and away you go.

      1. Bill Davis Avatar
        Bill Davis

        I’m using Brave on Windows 7. Does that make a difference?

        1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
          Jens-Ingo Farley

          It shouldn’t.

          1. Bill Davis Avatar
            Bill Davis

            Oh, I see what I did. I tried to install it to the wrong place. It works now. Thanks.

  8. Nicolai Avatar
    Nicolai

    This bookmarklet continues to be a work of genius that saves me from catatonic apoplexy when faced with the Facebook user interface (which I am forced to use for work).
    I applaud and salute you!

  9. Alan Avatar
    Alan

    Great bookmarklet and thank you for your work. I just have a quick question. when trying to expand comments of a user profile (Facebook new) it only grabs the topmost post. Is there an option to have the comments of other availabel posts too?

    1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
      Jens-Ingo Farley

      That wasn’t intentional. I attempted to fix it, hopefully without breaking some other case I’ve forgotten about.

  10. DP Avatar
    DP

    Excellent work, thank you so much for this. I’m using the new FB’s UI and your bookmarklet did help me to expand all new comments automatically. However, I only want to load the new comments – not to expand backward to view the previous comments in a post as it does currently. Can you please help me with that? Great thanks.

    1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
      Jens-Ingo Farley

      I can’t help with that. The closest I came in the past is another bookmarklet called Link Comments, but that broke and cannot be repaired, as Facebook no longer timestamps the responses in HTML.

      1. DP Avatar
        DP

        So sad to hear that 🙁 The new FB’s UI is making me crazy – all new comments cannot be loaded automatically as the previous UI did. Instead, it only displays ‘view xx more comments’ and ‘view more replies’ although I already open the post in an isolated browser window?!?! With that new UI, now I have no way to keep updated with the new comments in a FB post anymore 🙁

        1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
          Jens-Ingo Farley

          I wasn’t aware of the old feature(s) you describe. It sounds like you might have been using a plug-in of some kind.

          1. DP Avatar
            DP

            I’m actually not using any FB plugin, just a Chrome extension named ‘Auto Scroll’ which helps to keep any web-page be scrolled automatically to the bottom. With old FB’s UI, new comments were displayed automatically and ‘Auto Scroll’ will help me to always see the latest one at the bottom. With new FB’s UI, all new comments were grouped into the ‘view xx more comments’ and I found no way to always see the latest one automatically as before 🙁

          2. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
            Jens-Ingo Farley

            With the classic UI, you found a sweet spot that worked for you, which is great but is not a general case that would be universal. The threads I read generally have meaningful replies, so let’s say a thread with 10 comments and 10 replies per comment has 100 responses. Most do-not-miss responses are replies (not comments), and they are spread out across the tree of responses. Scrolling to the end would not solve anything in that case.

  11. frederic Avatar
    frederic

    Hello Jens-Ingo Farley!

    Expand All 2020-09-11
    Classic UI – 100%
    NewUI – it almost doesn’t work
    Will only expand posts in the first thread (“New activity”) in the group, others not affected. Just my two main groups are NewUI. The result is, if I’m interested, I have to do everything manually. This will be an endless struggle. :/
    I don’t know if it will have any effect, but wouldn’t it help to split the bookmarklet into 2?
    One for ClassicUI [ExpandAll_Cl], there probably won’t need to change anything in the long run.
    Second for NewUI [ExpandAll].
    Maybe it would help.

    Thank you!

    1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
      Jens-Ingo Farley

      It sounds like you are using a very old bookmarklet version, but that’s just a wild guess.

      To address your question, no, I think splitting the bookmarklet would be a nightmare, especially for users but also for me. Please see here. Your conception of the Classic UI differs from mine. The Classic UI was rewritten in March, to look the same as True-Classic, but it’s based on the New UI. The Classic-New UI is 100% incompatible with the True-Classic UI and continues to change. The current lifetime of the Classic UI (look) is less than one month now, according to Facebook.

      For me to make bookmarklet changes, I most likely need to see the problem (i.e., I need a URL that shows the problem), which I don’t in this case. For more on that, please see here.

      1. frederic Avatar
        frederic

        It’s weird, this is an old version, sometimes from the beginning of September or the end of August, it works:

        [massive text]

        The bookmarklet from 2020-09-11 doesn’t work. It works as I wrote, only the first post:

        I was lucky to find the older version not replaced. My problem is solved (infinite hide/unhide is less of a problem than no expand).

        1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
          Jens-Ingo Farley

          I’m flying blind here because I have no way to reproduce the problem.

          However, I noticed that Facebook changed recently, and I removed some code that all my test cases no longer hit. Perhaps it will improve your situation.

          1. frederic Avatar
            frederic

            Thank you Jens-Ingo Farley!
            I tried, the result is the same 2020-09-14. An older version works for me, probably 2020-08-18 or 2020-09-01/04. Since I’m the only one with a complaint, I tried the proxy. Some other European language (random proxy), so the first three threads expanded there. Another language, only 1 thread.

            It seems to work now for English only. Stupid is, I have a Facebook interface in English, but “new acvity” and some other items (a total of about 5 words, line above and line where in english is “Join Group”) are in another language according to IP. That will probably be a Facebook mistake. At ClassicUI, everything is in English.

            I have to wait until Facebook fixes the mix of languages in the groups. Facebook may make some changes, until great, the older version works. No problem! 🙂

  12. Louis Avatar
    Louis

    This bookmarklet was extremely useful for my workflow: capturing interesting posts with comments to PDF for archiving locally, thank you!

    It would be awesome if your bookmarklet also supported the Facebook mobile site. I may have a rare use case – wanting to print PDFs of Facebook pages with the sidebars hidden – but I found that the easiest way to hide Facebook’s sidebars was to use the mobile Facebook site (setting user agent to a mobile device), and then the bookmarklet couldn’t find the main content and wouldn’t expand comments.

    For anyone trying to do the same thing as me and finding this site, what I ended up doing was using an adblocker to block elements in the sidebars, hiding the content of the sidebars at least, but only partially expanding the width of main content. I end up with a PDF that is only 50% filled with the main content by width, the rest blank.

  13. frederic Avatar
    frederic

    It’s off topic, but maybe I’ll find an answer. Why are all Facebook pages unreadable without logging in? I watched them yesterday, and today they all need a login. All of them. Is it a protest or a change in Facebook settings? Thanks!

    1. frederic Avatar
      frederic

      Jens-Ingo Farley, you can delete this comment. It was only 24 hours. In the next 24 hours, all the groups I follow are again ClassicUI. All!
      Expand All works flawlessly! Thank you!

  14. Sun Avatar
    Sun

    The bookmarklet now goes into infinite loop, keeps opening same replies thread. Seems to be only getting stuck on larger threads of more than 10 replies.

    1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
      Jens-Ingo Farley

      Please try the latest bookmarklet. I’ve fixed this problem about 16 times now, and I’m hoping Facebook will change less often now that the Classic interface is no longer an option.

  15. ashley Avatar
    ashley

    First, huge thanks for this tool. I’ve only been using it for about a week and it has been so helpful. Second, I have the newest version and everything was working great until about 2 days ago, and now replies seem to open and then get hidden again. Apologies for bringing this up again, since it looks like you’ve fixed it a few times already!!

    1. ashley Avatar
      ashley

      And I should add that it is a bit sporadic – for me, it seems like this is happening most often on the posts with a lot (e.g. 1K+) of comments

      1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
        Jens-Ingo Farley

        The problem seems to be, once again, that the geographical area I’m in sees changes (a few weeks) after other (possibly less-trafficked) areas. Additional problem: Facebook keeps changing every few days/weeks; there’s no convergence on stability. When I originally published this bookmarklet in 2015, I had written it and used it daily for about one year with no changes. The stability was a surprise to me, thus I published it. I have no idea what to expect now, in terms of stability.

      2. rrr2 Avatar
        rrr2

        The same issue for me (the script clicks ‘Hide replies’ and goes to infinite loop), but clicking the bookmarklet again stops the cycle and leaves the page with most comments open. Very useful anyway!

        1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
          Jens-Ingo Farley

          Based on our different locations, I expect to see (and fix) the problem in the next few weeks.

        2. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
          Jens-Ingo Farley

          This time, it took about 10 hours for me to see “the” problem, which I fixed. If you still have a problem, then presumably it will take even more time for it to show up here in Silicon Valley.

  16. Alex Givens Avatar
    Alex Givens

    Hello! Wondering if you can make this prioritize expanding the “see more” elements first, and *then* the tree elements (view ## comments), and then any remaining “see more” elements that are revealed in the additional comments. This makes sense as there seem to be problems with the collapse/expand endless toggle, and this would mean at least the “see more” elements will be revealed. Even if issues continue, the bookmarklet would thus still be able to be used, as one could click the few “view ## comments” and run the bookmarklet to reveal the many “see more” elements (less clicks in all).

    1. Alex Givens Avatar
      Alex Givens

      Or, if thre could be a separate bookmarklet, that only expanded the visible “see more” elements, that would be very useful to have too.

    2. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
      Jens-Ingo Farley

      It now clicks any See More links before and after expansion.

  17. Norbert Avatar
    Norbert

    Hi,

    Thanks for the extension!

    The latest version (2020-11-24) does not work with this page:
    https://www.facebook.com/groups/SALVUS/permalink/1045334152560759/

    1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
      Jens-Ingo Farley

      It works for me. What are you seeing?

    2. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
      Jens-Ingo Farley

      Oh. It only fails if I’m not logged into Facebook. I will fix this shortly.

    3. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
      Jens-Ingo Farley

      Fixed. Thanks for the URL.

      1. Norbert Avatar
        Norbert

        Actually, I’m logged in and still not works, but tried in incognito and it works fine, so it does not like one of my extension, I assume.
        Thanks for your quick reply!

        1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
          Jens-Ingo Farley

          Actually, it seems to mean that you are seeing Facebook changes (in Hungary) before I am here in Silicon Valley, which seems to be last in the world to get changes.

          1. Norbert Avatar
            Norbert

            Maybe you’re right because after I logged into Facebook from incognito mode, without extensions, it does not work again.
            We are so lucky. 😀

  18. Christie Avatar
    Christie

    Thank you for continuing to update this!

  19. Abdulhafid Abdalnoor Avatar
    Abdulhafid Abdalnoor

    I’ve 13K Comments, its only shows me the first 3K Comments!! i want to see the first Comment.

    1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
      Jens-Ingo Farley

      Have you viewed the troubleshooting section?

  20. Brian Avatar
    Brian

    Thanks again for your continued diligence in updating your bookmarklet! Is there a way to download older versions of it? I just updated to the January 8 version that has the caveat “does not currently work in Chrome 49 or Edge”. I am using it on 64-bit Firefox 84.0.2 on Windows 10 and it is hanging at “Expanding: Topmost post” or “Expanding: Main content area” depending on context. This appears to be consistent. When I hit Escape, it does immediately respond with “Aborting…”, but then stops there as well.

    1. Brian Avatar
      Brian

      Hrm, curiously the January 8 version _does_ work with Brave 1.18.78 (Chromium 87.0.4280.141). I found the older January 6 version in a backup, and that does work with the aforementioned Firefox 84.

      1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
        Jens-Ingo Farley

        I’ve gone back to posting daily updates as Facebook updates daily (I took out the experimental approach); maybe I’ll come up with something better later.

      2. Brian Avatar
        Brian

        Ugh, so after a bit of troubleshooting it appears it is the combination of the bookmarklet and the FB Purity plugin for Firebox that is causing the conflict. Older versions of the bookmarklet worked fine with FBP, so something changed with Jan 8 that is causing the problem. I’m not well-versed in Javascript, but I’ll have a poke around with a diff between the Jan 6 and Jan 8 bookmarklets to see what I see.

        1. Brian Avatar
          Brian

          Thanks! I can confirm that the Jan 9 update now works again with Firefox + FBP. Curse you, Facebook!

  21. TJIC Avatar

    Great tool.

    TY for writing this.

  22. Brian Avatar
    Brian

    I assume Facebook is doing these daily code variations to thwart automated scrapers and other bots, and thus inadvertently also affect automation tools like your bookmarklet. Would there be any advantage to implementing this as a browser extension? Obvious caveat is that you’d need one for each browser engine…

    1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
      Jens-Ingo Farley

      No, being a browser extension would not change being affected by the daily Facebook changes.

  23. Adam Wildavsky Avatar

    Facebook wrote React to use internally, then open-sourced it. I’d be surprised if they were not using it.

    Thanks for an awesome pair of tools! They make FB usable for me.

  24. Roselyn Avatar
    Roselyn

    I wonder if the bug in vivaldi ( which destroy you’r skript when i dragg it to the bookmarksbar) should be fixed? From what I understand, it has been like this for several years now. Can you please fix this?

  25. Jack Su Avatar
    Jack Su

    Hello:

    Thank you for writing this useful bookmarking tool, but I have a question I want to ask you about the problem I encountered while using this tool. When I use this tool to post on the fan page, this tool can’t expand all the messages and will get stuck in the topmost. I would like to ask you if there is a solution. I think this problem should be caused by the recent revision of Facebook. I look forward to it. Thank you for your reply!

    Remarks: the version I’m using is the traditional Chinese version.

  26. Jack Su Avatar
    Jack Su

    Thank you for writing this great bookmarklet. But there is a question when I using this tools, it can’t be used normally in fan page posts (https://www.facebook.com/kocpctw/posts/10158376499485674), it will get stuck in the topmost, and then stop.

    1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
      Jens-Ingo Farley

      Thank you for the URL. It’s getting stuck trying to change the response filter to All Comments (from 最相關 to 所有留言, but it’s language independent). Until I have a chance to look at it shortly, you can work around it by manually changing the filter to All Comments (所有留言) or changing the Expand All settings to “Don’t force All Comments filter.”

      1. Jack Su Avatar
        Jack Su

        Thank you for fixing this bug, but I still found a problem. In this URL(https://www.facebook.com/CTfans/posts/10158692576407479), when I use your tool to expand the message for the first time, only 2 responses will be displayed, but when I use your tool again, it will be able to expand the whole message completely, I don’t know what caused the problem, I look forward to your reply, thank you.

      2. Jack Su Avatar
        Jack Su

        The browser I used is firefox.

      3. Jack Su Avatar
        Jack Su

        I have tried many times and found that this problem does not happen often. Sometimes I can expand all the messages successfully, sometimes I can’t expand the messages. In short, there is a certain chance that the messages cannot be opened successfully.

      4. Jack Su Avatar
        Jack Su

        After a period of testing and different URLs, I think the problem should be this, after clicking “All comments”, the next step may be executed before all the comments are loaded, so the total number of comments cannot be calculated correctly. The above is my own guess, for your reference

        1. Jack Su Avatar
          Jack Su

          I think you can try to add some spare time between “click All comments” and the next step, maybe can improve this problem, thank you!

          1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
            Jens-Ingo Farley

            All of your comments are astute. The change I made yesterday turned out to be more of a workaround that didn’t work very well. I will try to fix it better shortly.

          2. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
            Jens-Ingo Farley

            I think I’ve fixed this now, with two other things fixed, as well.

      5. Jack Su Avatar
        Jack Su

        Thank you for actively helping me solve the problem. After several URL tests, I have been able to open the message successfully. Finally, thank you again for your help. If there are other problems in the future, I will reflect to you, thank you.

    2. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
      Jens-Ingo Farley

      I have put up a new bookmarklet.

  27. Rita Avatar

    You’re a life saver! Thank you, thank you, thank you! I’m a researcher and I need to save relevant posts in pdf with all the comments expanded and I was doing it by hand so far…. You saved me so much time. Eternally grateful!

    1. George Avatar
      George

      After loading the FB page, links to the individual posts are hidden – in code is set href = ‘#’. The link with POST_ID is generated after javascript action, onmouseover or onmouseclick. Is it possible to implement this feature into this great script? Thank you in advance

  28. Sunny Avatar
    Sunny

    Could you please make it expand all posts on a search page? FB removed links to individual posts so it’s impossible to go to each post and expand it there. Thank you!

    1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
      Jens-Ingo Farley

      My bookmarklet doesn’t change Facebook’s behavior; it only automates clicks. The only thing I see that stopped working is my bookmarklet used to detect search results and then “remind” you to drill down individually before expanding. You say that doesn’t work for you, but it works for me. It could be that Facebook was temporary broken.

  29. Gab Arito Avatar
    Gab Arito

    Your script/bookmarklet is very useful and I use it every single day.
    Sometimes, I face a very long page, having hundreds of comments, most of them with “See more” link.
    If I didn’t find your script, I don’t know how I’d live…
    Many thanks.

    But I have a question and maybe a request about Facebook.
    I use to read too many user forums. The most of them has page number link to navigate through the threads.
    It’s very useful. I click on number 50 and go directly to page 50.

    Facebook isn’t that way. Facebook has a resource called (I think) ‘infinite page’.
    Sometimes, I would like or I really need to go (what I say?) to page 50.

    Instead to do the same what I do on forums, I have to roll 50 pages that I don’t want to see.
    Too many problems here…
    I waste time
    I use too much RAM memory
    I’m forced to see too many posts I don’t want to.

    If the user is post too much per month, how to go to his post of january 2019?

    I’ve already search for a solution on Google. No success.
    Maybe it would be solved by a script?
    Even if the answer is ‘no’, how do you work around the problem I described above?

    Thanks.

    1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
      Jens-Ingo Farley

      I find paging to be quite useless. You mention clicking on page 50 and going to page 50. How on earth did you know to click on page 50 and not any other page? You should never have to page. You should always be able to search/filter meaningful results to fit on less than one page.

      My feeling is that Facebook has the most useless search feature that could exist. Like my previous response to a previous thread, let me say that my bookmarklet does not fix Facebook problems; it just automates clicking.

      1. Gab Arito Avatar
        Gab Arito

        Ok, I understand your point.
        Your bookmarklet isn’t to fix Facebook weakness.
        What I mean about to go to page 50 is just to detach the need to go to the very past.

        In your personal use of Facebook, how do you go to posts of 2018? Do you scroll everything till to reach there? Even from your own page and posts. How to read old posts?

        That’s my point.

        By the way, congrats and thanks, again, for your excelent job with your tool.

        1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
          Jens-Ingo Farley

          There is not a way to systematically and quickly find old posts that I know of. The Facebook search/filter UI is entirely useless, as it does not work. If it actually worked, it would be reasonable. I’d just bring up the UI and select the year. But it does not work. The search interface has been broken and utterly useless for over 10 years. I have no solution, other than be resigned that it does not work.

      2. Gab Arito Avatar
        Gab Arito

        Maybe, I didn’t explain well.
        I mean to go to page 50, but it isn’t to have all 50 pages shown on a single screen.
        I mean a, let’s say, only 10 posts per page/screen, but related to that period.

        1. Jens-Ingo Farley Avatar
          Jens-Ingo Farley

          I hope you realize you are describing a futile situation that just replaces one broken way of operating with another broken way of operating. IMO, if you are paging, the UI is broken. I described the alternative to paging in my previous response.

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