Can't get all the users in a Facebook group using FQL

Question

I'm trying to get the name of every user in a Facebook group using this FQL query:

select first_name,last_name from user where uid in (select uid from group_member where gid=123)

However, this only gets about 5000 out of the 7000 members in the group. I don't appear in the results, neither do some of my friends. Both my friend and I have the "Platform apps" setting enabled, so FQL should be able to access our data.

What's wrong with the query? I'm using Facebook's Graph API Explorer and FQL v1.0.

Answer 1

From Facebook's blog post on How-To: Paging with the Graph API and FQL:

In addition to the limits mentioned in the documentation for each of the tables and connections listed above, it is helpful to know that the maximum number of results we will fetch before running the visibility checks is 5,000.

So, this means that Facebook will only fetch AT THE MAX 5,000 results, that too before the visibility check. That means the number of results that you'll obtain cannot exceed the limit!

Here's how visibility check works on the results (copied from the blog post):

NOTE: The blog article is a bit old, but I'm sure that it applies to FQL v1.0.