Does Facebook automatically archive older posts in a group? How can I access these archived posts?

Question

I've just finished teaching an undergraduate literature class which ran for the last few months. Every week, my students would meet up outside of class and discuss the text they were reading, and prepare a short report. These reports were all posted to a Facebook group.

I'm now going to the Facebook group and copying all of the reports into an email so that the students have them all in one place as they prepare for their exams. However, it seems that the group has only kept posts back to a certain date.

Maybe I'm misremembering when we started using the group? Or does Facebook actually archive old group posts? Is there a way I can access these older posts if they exist?

Answer 1

No, Facebook does not archive the posts but for your purposes they may as well be archived.

Facebook uses infinite paging. In order to see older posts you have to page down and down and down until your browser cache sucks up all your available memory and crashes your computer.

You could:

1. Buy more memory and a weight to put on the page down key

2. Write a scraper in Python

3. Use a pay for service to get all the groups posts.

Answer 2

Yes, you can. There is no way in seeing all posts in a nice lists, but you can utilize the search box to find specific posts.