FSX Trader Broken due to Facebook Login Changes

Posted on January 01, 2008

Facebook obviously does not want people writing bots that log into (facebook) accounts. Clearly, automation in this area could have potentially nefarious goals (i.e. see MySpace bulletin/comment spamming, etc).

This is ironic though (or hypocritical), since Facebook built much of its user acquisition on this exact same technique via its GMail, Hotmail and Yahoo contact import scripts.

Even though my FSX Trader library is for personal use only, it has since become broken due to changes in the Facebook login mechanism.

The FSX Trader lib currently uses ruby’s WWW::Mechanize library which might not have as good of JavaScript support.

One alternative would be to rewrite the library to use FireWatir or Watir which actually drive the browser.

To my knowledge, without using a CAPTCHA, there is no way to defeat an automated login system that actually drives the browser as FireWatir and Watir do.