Chromebot

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Revision as of 22:02, 26 April 2019 by ATrescue (talk | contribs) (Correct website name.)
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chromebot is an IRC bot parallel to ArchiveBot that uses Google Chrome and thus is able to archive JavaScript-heavy websites. Both, software and bot, are maintained by User:PurpleSymphony. WARCs are uploaded daily to the chromebot collection on archive.org.

By default the bot only grabs a single URL. However it supports recursion, which is rather slow, since every single page needs to be loaded and rendered by a browser. A dashboard is available for watching the progress of such jobs.

Usage[1]

You can call chromebot on the #archivebot (on hackint) IRC channel, which chromebot shares with it's parent ArchiveBot. Both “chromebot” and “chromebot:” work, with or without the colon. The username can be autocompleted using the “Tab” key in the EFNet web chat interface or IRC client.

Command Description
chromebot: a <uuid>
chromebot a <uuid>
Archive <url> with <concurrency> processes according to recursion <policy>.
chromebot: s <uuid>
chromebot s <uuid>
Get job status for <uuid>.
chromebot: r <uuid>
chromebot r <uuid>
Revoke or abort running job with <uuid>.

Please note that the commands are case-sensitive.


Restrictions

Instagram.com

ChromeBot has been blacklisted by Instagram, a website infamous for being an archival loophole.

When trying to archive any Instagram.com website, chromebot responds with the following error:

<Instagram.com URL> cannot be queued: Banned by Instagram

One way to bypass Instagram's restrictions partially is using Insta-Stalker.com, which is just a third-party web viewer for Instagram, equipped with an AJAX-free user search feature and the ability to view profiles without Instagram's new Web-App-type website (similar to Twitter Lite) that made Instagram inaccessible to the Wayback Machine and Archive.Today's crawlers. The former gets stuck in an infinite refresh loop.

URL format:

References