this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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Is there a reason you're scraping data rather than attaching a network sniffer/reverse engineering the official apps and documenting the results? Or map the RSS feed to an API? The main thrust behind my comment is that I think scraping is pretty fragile, so I'm interested as to why other options are infeasible.
Because we need to retain the breadth of functionality the API has, if you want to just scrape posts, APIs for that already exist, but i am aiming for something more.
About reverse engineering, they can change that part at any time too, and may be even more fragile as they can change that without breaking the UX, if they change the front page CSS selectors or layout for example, it will effect the UX more as it changes the expected output, not the middle end that is just raw data.
Thats my reasoning, I appreciate the input though (:
Making a breaking change to the mobile API also breaks old outdated installations of the app. Websites and their APIs are usually synced, apps not so.
If they were really motivated to stop your method, they could just obfuscate the frontend with webpack and break your scraper every time they make an update.