Userscripts.org

I am guessing from your comment that the box showed with 2 friends, but under their names it said "Cannot find friend data. Check the link below."? This is an occasional issue that I'm looking at; did the links not work then?

This seems to occasionally be the case for people who use the Facebook vanity urls (http://www.facebook.com/YourNameHere), but I couldn't get a consistent behaviour when testing. If someone with a normal Facebook address deletes you then it should act normally.

I will look at making this work 100% of the time, but as the script wasn't working for everyone I just wanted to get something out that actually does work (I don't know what proportion of people have these urls, but it will work perfectly for most of my friends), and even if the name cannot be found the link should work. Now to reiterate my previous question; did the links below the name work for you?

So it's not actually a problem then? As I said I will look at changing this at some point to display names properly every time, but at the moment I am happy for this to just work most of the time.

@Matthew Tommasi: Well I can test it myself, and I can see this behaviour so I'm not disputing that. I assume that your wife does have a vanity URL, and that the link did actually work then?

I do appreciate these comments but I don't view this as an actual bug, more a limitation; the script does still function. I don't get any money for my scripts, I spend my limited spare time working on them, and it's a relatively thankless task. Please be assured that I will find a way of fixing this at some point, but I did not think it a problem big enough to not list the script as it is.

Ok, I took some time out to work on this tonight and I believe this should be working now.

@AndreJP: If the friend removed you before the update then this will be the case. The new version will only show names properly of people who delete you after the update. Does the link look like a link to a Facebook profile? I would imagine that if it is redirecting you to the home page then perhaps the user deactivated their account. If this is the case, then I don't know any way to get information for that person.

@hncheerios: I will probably update the about section of the script to explain this later, but he's a brief summary of the process for if someone deletes you;

• The script goes through your friends list comparing the friend ID with the list from the last time it checked.
• If a friend ID is in the old list but not the new one, then it will try to get the profile page (http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=12345) for that person to find their name and picture.
• If that person has a vanity URL then it will get that address (http://www.facebook.com/vanirtURL) from the page it loads first and then try to load that page to get the picture and name.
• If it still cannot get a name and picture from that page then it returns the "Cannot find friend data. Check the link below." message.

If there is any hole in the logic (or indeed if Facebook has changed anything), the link should take you to that person's profile page.

Troy Thompson wrote:
@znerp What if you used http://www.facebook.com/ajax/typeahead_search.php instead to save your friends? Store name, picture, etc in advance.

That sounds promising, I will look into that. I will be away with work this week so it might be a while before I can get this fixed though.

Indeed, and that's how the script used to work (indeed, if you install the version from 20th August then it will function fine in this way if you have <400 friends). The problem was that people were getting very upset because they had more than 400 friends and it didn't work for them, so it was really a trade-off. As I say I am out of the country at the moment so don't have a few hours to spare, but as soon as I do I will look at making this change.