Dealing with Errors

[Legend 181]

I was just wondering how you guys generally deal with the odd error that comes up during account creation, posting, scraping, looping etc. For example if a captcha doesn't solve correctly or a field is skipped or something unexpected happens to lose the flow of things and take you out of the loop how do you get things back on track? How to restart from a specific point or restart completely without having to manually go in and restart everything from the beginning?

 

I'd like to hear about any and all your ideas for dealing with this type of thing in a general way. I've been trying to code for every possibility, but it seems something is always missed. Do you just keep going back in and plugging the holes or is there some way to keep a bucket handy for catching water without rebuilding the house?

 

Any thoughts?

 

http://ubotstudio.com/forum/public/style_emoticons/default/huh.gif

[Pete 121]

Depends

 

Most of the time I only use one error list

Navigate to page

Search page if is object found continual

Else

Add to error list url , plus a custom Id for the page

Rinse and repeat for each step

Save it as a csv file for easy sorting

This gives you a handy list to test against and pin points any problem pages

[Legend 181]

Makes sense... interesting...

 

Thanks for sharing that.

 

http://ubotstudio.com/forum/public/style_emoticons/default/rolleyes.gif

[a2mateit 395]

I like to code for every possible error as well.

 

You have to remember there are only so many errors that can happen and get the error code for every one. I will do things like purposefully enter in two passwords that do not match to get that error.

 

Sign up for the site with a username and email, then try signing up again with the same username and email to get the username already exists error and the email already exists error.

 

Then type the captcha in wrong to get the captcha incorrect error. Doing this will allow you to grab pretty much all the potential errors. Then you just code in a big if/then statement to check for all the potential errors after the sign up button is clicked.

 

Use the if/then in conjuction with the loop while, and this will pretty much ensure that your bot works 100% of the time (besides the usual ubot crashes and hiccups).

 

HTH,

Justin

[Legend 181]

This is pretty much what I've been doing... be nice if there was a "on error " command that took care of all of them... http://ubotstudio.com/forum/public/style_emoticons/default/wink.gif

[a2mateit 395]

This is pretty much what I've been doing... be nice if there was a "on error " command that took care of all of them... http://ubotstudio.com/forum/public/style_emoticons/default/wink.gif

 

I think that would be a little to difficult for the dev team since there are just so many different sites. It would be virtually impossible to try and code errors for every single individual site out there that we try to automate.

 

Would be a nice feature though...

[jamesfar 15]

what about using label and go to?

 

so if a step failed we can use goto to tell ubot to go to the step that has label on it

[gabel 51]

if/then/else/else if and loop while are perfect and more then enough for this. like a2mateit said there are errors specific to each site so impossible to add them , that's why if/else/else if and loop while are exactly what you need.

[Legend 181]

Some great advise here guys... thanks!!

 

One of the areas that seems to bog me down is looping in and out of error control. Looping while and waiting for results always gives me a headache.

 

As an easy example, if a captcha doesn't work, it will return an error. So after the solve captcha command I will do a search page for the error message. Then I will ideally do a loop while the error message exists to keep trying until it gets it right. In most cases the error message will remain on the page until the submit button is pressed so this needs to be included in the loop along with an appropriate wait command to allow the submit to work before searching again.

 

Does that make sense?

 

Am I missing any key ingredients? Does anyone have a working example of how this would best be done? If so, the same logic can be applied to most error messages (theoretically). The wait times or the search or the loop while seem to always be stepping on each other's toes (little tiny bot toes of course) and a smooth solution has eluded me.

 

Using hotmail as an example, here is what I am using now, which works, but is not ideal. How would I loop this like in the example above so that it waits and loops while if and until successful? Where would I loop and where would I wait?

 

change attribute(<id="iCdHIPBInput0">, "value", $solve captcha(<id="iCdHIPRImg">))

click(<title="I accept">, "Left Click", "No")

if($search page("Please try again.")) {

then {

change attribute(<id="iCdHIPBInput0">, "value", $solve captcha(<id="iCdHIPRImg">))

}

}

 

IF a working solution is presented THEN everyone can use it for dealing with those pesky error messages ELSEIF we will keep looking for an ideal solution (being the persistent automatons we are). http://ubotstudio.com/forum/public/style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif

[JohnB 255]

Technically Duane you wouldn't want it to keep going until it was successful...You may have hit the the 8 hour shift where the stumbling drunk guy is on duty at the captcha service...just saying...

 

J

[Legend 181]

lol

 

 

I also considered encountering multiple errors (in hotmail's case it expects your friends name to have more than 3 characters... sorry Leo, Ira, Tim, etc. hotmail says you can't be my friend anymore) so if you get an error like that on top of the captcha error then your little bot has its work cut out for it.

 

In all likelihood there is no perfect solution as there are as many possible snafus as there are variables... the above example wasn't just restricted to captcha, but to any error message with the potential to repeat itself which I tend to encounter more than the stumbling drunk guy at the captcha service (largely because I tend to run my captcha needing bots when I know TJ isn't at work)... http://ubotstudio.com/forum/public/style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif