Several questions about the Webrecorder Desktop

• What’s the difference between “building locally” and downloading the installer DMG? Does one work any better than the other? Do they have the same functionality? Because I’ve encountered some difficulties:

• When I use the automation button, it only has the scrolling function. I don’t see it clicking any buttons, following any links, capturing any videos. Is there a setting somewhere that makes that run correctly? Or is it all manual capture with the desktop model?

• I’ve tried clearing cache and running capture for sites I have to login to,. Webrecorder seems to stop and never loads the page. I’m not getting any prompt to login. Should I be? I’m actually already logged into the site.

• Is any of this login sent back to a Conifer or another site?

Answers to your questions below:

Building locally means you can change the code and create a new .dmg from scratch on your own.
It should build the same DMG installer as is being available for download.

The Autopilot works on a select few sites with prescripted behaviors, it doesn’t provide generic crawling for any site. It was designed to automate only certain sites. We’re working on providing a comprehensive list, but it currently works well on Twitter, Instagram (when logged in), Youtube, Soundcloud, Slideshare.
It’s, as of this writing, broken on Facebook.
For other sites that do not have a specific behavior, the generic scrolling behavior will be used.

After you clear the cache and reload, it should load the login page again.
Do you have any examples of where the issue is happening?

No, all archived content is stored on your computer and not sent anywhere.
If you choose, you can export and upload the WARC files to Conifer or other services on your own.

Hope this helps clear things up!

Regarding capture on a site that requires login, I’m trying to capture pages on an intranet. I’m already authenticated and can see the pages in my browser. When I try to capture those intranet pages, Webrecorder just hangs.

Just wanted to mention that the use case @ravi mentions, capturing an intranet, is very interesting to me too, and had a similar issue when I first tried it, so it would be great to know more about this!

And a clarification about this: is it correct to say that the credentials are stored in the WARC? If yes, are they easily retrievable/a cause for privacy concern?

Any update on this? Still looking for a way to use Webrecorder Desktop on an intranet.

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