As you know, our beloved game Scrabulous is no longer available for Facebook users in the US or Canada. But there is a workaround that will enable you to continue playing, and it won’t take you more than 15 minutes, tops.
Facebook can tell what your location is based on your IP address when you connect to their servers. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry about it, but basically it is kind of like looking at the area code on your caller id to determine the caller’s location.
What you are going to do is set up your computer to use a proxy server ONLY for playing Scrabulous. What this means is instead of connecting to the Facebook application servers directly, you will go through a third party. The third party will be located outside of the US and Canada, and when Facebook sees you coming from that other location, it will let you play. All other web browsing will be unaffected and will be exactly as it is now.
Below are the instructions. Print them out or copy and paste them to some other application if you happen to be using Firefox right at this moment, because you will have to restart your browser.
If you get stuck or get confused, go to an excellent tutorial made by Ryan Smith at http://scrabulous.razwebs.com/index.html which will show you all the steps. It will download a video showing everything Ryan did to get it working on his machine. It may download slowly on your machine, so be patient. This is the closest you can get to looking over someone else’s shoulder while they show you how to set this up.
1. Install Firefox. This is easy to do on any operating system. Don’t let anyone tell you it won’t work on Windows, that isn’t true. Go here:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
And click on the free download button. The instructions are easy to follow so I won’t go into that here.
Theoretically these concepts could work for any browser, but these instructions are going to set you up with a special proxy server setup only available on Firefox that won’t interfere with your other web browsing if your proxy server is slow or goes down (which can and will happen). But besides, you should use Firefox anyway because Firefox is a much better browser. Seriously, you will start using it all the time.2. Install FoxyProxy. Go here using your new Firefox browser:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2464
And click the add to Firefox button. A window will pop up – hit the install button when it becomes activated. It will install and prompt you to restart Firefox. Click the restart button.
3. When it restarts it will ask you if you want to configure FoxyProxy for use with Tor. Click no, since it serves no purpose for what we are doing here.
4. In the Firefox Browser menu, go to Tools -> FoxyProxy -> Options. The FoxyProxy options window will appear. In the Proxies tab, click the Add New Proxy button. A Proxy Settings window will appear.
5. On the general tab (first one), enter scrabulous in the Proxy Name box. On the Patterns tab (last one), click the add new pattern button. An Add/Edit pattern window will appear. Enter scrabulous in the pattern name field and “*apps.facebook.com/scrabulous*” in the URL pattern. Or use “*apps.new.facebook.com/scrabulous*” if you are using the new facebook site. Enter that exactly without the quotes. Hit OK.
Have a look at this if you get confused:
http://scrabulous.razwebs.com/step5.html
6. In the Proxy Settings window, go to the Proxy Details tab. This is where you enter your proxy server. To get a proxy server, go to this website:
http://www.proxy4free.com/page1.html
Bookmark that later.
Note that at this moment in the instructions you can not go there with your Firefox browser because of the other open windows. This lists proxy servers and their location by country. Pick one that is not in the US or Canada, obviously. You may have to try more than one to get one that works. Be patient, many of them will be too slow or not respond at all. When I wrote this I was using one in China (host name = 60.28.196.119 port 80), but it doesn’t work now so use a different one. Enter the host name (IP on the website) and port in the two text boxes, then click OK.
7. In the FoxyProxy Options window, change the mode to the first option, Use proxies based on their pre-defined patterns and priorities.
8. What we have now done is set up only your Firefox browser to use the proxy server ONLY for playing scrabulous. Any other web request will go through the regular channels. If your proxy server goes down or is slow, it won’t affect your other browsing. Note that if you want to disable the proxy server at any time, you can simply go to Tools -> FoxyProxy -> Completely disable FoxyProxy.
9. Now, test it. Using Firefox, log into Facebook and go to scrabulous. If it is no longer in your applications list, you may have to go to http://apps.facebook.com/scrabulous/ or http://apps.new.facebook.com/scrabulous/ directly. (Most likely it will not be on your applications list, so do not be alarmed if this is the case.) When you click on the link for scrabulous you should see your games and not the message about scrabulous being no longer available. If your browser does not respond or gives an error, you need to change your proxy settings. Note you will have to do this from time to time because proxy servers do not last forever.
Also test by viewing some Facebook photos and some non-Facebook websites. If you have trouble looking at Facebook photos or other websites you may have incorrectly entered the pattern in step 5. You will be able to see in the lower right hand corner of your Firefox browser if it is trying to use a proxy server for the page you happen to be on.
Sometimes people get frustrated trying many proxy servers, and it can be confusing if it is facebook or the proxy server that is causing it to not work. One suggestion which might help is to go back to step 5 and enter a pattern like *.cnn.com* and see if you can browse the cnn.com website. CNN doesn’t block anyone, so if you can’t do that then either the proxy server is bad or you set something up wrong.
If you can get to the scrabulous board but the board is blank, that means you do not have flash installed properly, or firefox can n ot use it as an addin. To fix that, try going here with your browser:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/
And click download now.
10. To change your proxy server, go to Tools -> FoxyProxy -> Options, and then double click on the scrabulous proxy you created, which is in the list box. On the proxy details tab, change the host name and port to be a different server using the url from step 6. Test it, and continue playing. Enjoy!
replace “Facebook.com” with whatever site you need to see (bbc.com, pandora.com, etc.)
