Limitations and Known Issues

To make sure you have the best possible experience with SFM, you should be aware of the limitations and known issues:

  • SFM is does not currently run with HTTPS (Ticket #361).
  • Because of the need to link a Heritrix container and a web harvester container, the web harvester cannot be scaled with docker-compose scale command (Ticket 408)
  • Changes to the hostname of server (e.g., from the reboot of an AWS EC2 instance) are not handled (Ticket 435)

We are planning to address these in future releases. In the meantime, there are work-arounds for many of these issues. For a complete list of tickets, see https://github.com/gwu-libraries/sfm-ui/issues

In addition, you should be aware of the following:

  • The current implementation of web harvesting is not optimal and requires significant additional work or reconsideration. In particular: (1) It does not scale: under normal collecting scenarios, web harvesting can lag far behind social media collecting. (2) It is not reliable: Heritrix requires more fiddling and testing.
  • Access to the Weibo API is limited, so make sure you understand what can be collected.
  • SFM does not currently provide a web interface for “replaying” the collected social media or web content.
  • ELK is only experimental. Scaling and administration of ELK have not been considered.