eventko service stopped

Due to Facebook being more and more persistent in blocking scrapers I will no longer maintain Eventko scraping project (https://eventko.easwee.net), since it is way to much effort to keep it running for no profit. This was a handy tool for me and a few of my friends to have a nice and clean daily list of quality events happening in our city.

A short development history #

I first started Eventko as a service calling Facebook /events endpoint through their official API. As you may know Facebook (now Meta) removed the /events endpoint from their Graph API a few years ago. After rewriting the scraper to parse the mobile.facebook.com that serves SSR content (or at least used to at the time), which was easier to parse, they started serving login walls that prevented scraping without authenticating. To avoid this I switched to Puppeteer and did the actual login flow, auth token storing and just simulated the user flow on the latest FB site. While this lasted for a while, eventually the server that hosts Eventko scraper got blacklisted. I took time again and rewrote it to scrape with rotating residential proxies. This works ok, but good residential proxies don't come as a free service and require a monthly fee, which I'm not interested in subscribing to just to run a service used by 10 people. Using free public proxy lists is not an option, since those lists are already blacklisted and often contain offline or very slow entries.

So until I get a new idea on how to serve a quality list of events I'll just keep it offline. At least it was a good project from which I learned a lot about scraping and bypassing anti-scraping measures.