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The app that I am testing is a plug in app to Facebook. I need to test the app for users having varying fan network ranging from 1 to 1 million.

The question is: How to create users in this range with different fan networks? Any automated program will be blocked by FB. Can anyone suggest ways to test it?

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  • This sounds like a good reason to use mocking.
    – user246
    Commented Apr 16, 2012 at 17:30
  • Can you please elaborate?
    – user_80
    Commented Apr 16, 2012 at 18:34
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    I do not know anything about Facebook APIs, so my comment may not make any sense. If you want to test scaling to a large network, and Facebook policies get into the way, perhaps you should test using mocked-up Facebook APIs.
    – user246
    Commented Apr 16, 2012 at 21:58
  • I agree with user246, another option would be to invite close friends to a "closed beta" where they can add your program and help you test it out.
    – Sam Woods
    Commented Apr 17, 2012 at 15:41
  • Yep, for personal viewing and testing of the interactions maybe a "closed beta" style setup like Sam suggests would work well. But for scale you'd probably have to essentially "fake it" I think. Find out what calls you're making to FB and simulate the response in as close to a production environment as you can recreate. This still leaves the ever unreliable Graph API connection scripts to deal with later, but should get things started.
    – maznika
    Commented Apr 21, 2012 at 1:07

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Mocking up the interaction w/ FB like user246 suggests would probably be the fastest route as far as getting things set up and having full control over your environment.

But if you want real interaction with FB accounts, they do allow for test account creation as long as those accounts are linked to a main developer account responsible for them. Those test users are not visible to the public at all, and neither are interactions with them. Those test users can also be created pretty quickly as long as your using their Graph API to access FB data.

Info on how to do that is here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/test_users/

I hope that helps!

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  • I believe the test account limit is 500 -- somewhat short of the OP's stated upper limit of one million.
    – user246
    Commented Apr 20, 2012 at 18:22
  • Oh, yeah. There is a limit of 500 per app token. That is a bit far from 1 million definitely. I wasn't sure as I hadn't seen the "mn" abbreviation before for million :)
    – maznika
    Commented Apr 20, 2012 at 18:56

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