Cannot get page wall posts using Access Token

Question

I'm an administrator of a group where my friends and I post music. It's a private group.

I want to get my own USER access token to get the JSON of the posts to this wall. I don't need to post to it, I just want to retrieve the contents so i can stick it on a tumblr.

As I recall from a couple of years ago, the Facebook API is a completely bloated, convoluted pile of crap with little in the way of simple documentation, so I don't know why I'm surprised at the difficulty in getting such a simple piece of information.

I have used an existing old app that I created a while ago to request my access token (I just used the object that was output by with_js_sdk.php when I put in the appid and secretid) and what I received gave me an empty data json - which means the access token didn't work. I retrieved the app access token using grant_type=client_credentials and that also didn't work. Is there a version of Grant_type that will give me an up to date access token for myself? Or do I need to grant something permission to see the posts on this page (even tho I'm accessing it as myself), so I've no idea what I'd grant permissions for.

Can someone just tell me how to get my own access token to see the posts in this group? It's driving me mad. One site told me I had to get an SSL certificate, which is bonkers.

This is my current request: https://graph.facebook.com/171089229612510/feed?format=json&limit=25&since=1334425968&__previous=1&access_token=[ACCESS_TOKEN]

Or just this https://graph.facebook.com/171089229612510/feed?access_token=[ACCESS_TOKEN]

Answer 1

Maybe you'll be happy to learn that the docs and the API are way improved compared to a couple of years ago.

To read the feed for a group, you'll need to request the user_groups permission as described in the graph api documentation for the group object.

Try it out using the graph explorer before writing any code.

And then, since you are using an old app, you'd do well to make sure you are using the latest version of the SDK.