need to stop webinator from submitting forms

cindy_walker · Post by **cindy_walker** » Mon Sep 29, 2003 5:40 pm

I just updated our dowalk and webinatoradmin scripts to the latest version. Now we find that webinator submits empty forms as it indexes. One particular form was submitted 38 times over the weekend. The form-handler then sent an useless email notification to a large group of people 38 times. The script that handles that form is now programmed to ignore empty submissions but I'd like to get webinator to stop trying to submit forms. You don't want people going straight to a form-handling script even if they find it by searching.

With the old version of dowalk, indexing took about three hours. This time it walked for 71 hours before I finally stopped it. I believe it stopped looking at new pages hours before, but was unable to finish indexing. I saw the same pages listed on the Walk Status page for hours.

What do I change in the dowalk script to stop this behavior? Or should I just switch back to the older versions of dowalk and webinatoradmin?

My other question is why did webinator submit the form 38 times when there are only two links to the form in question? It submitted it every hour or two through an entire weekend.

We're using Enterprise Webinator 4.0 on Irix. (November 21, 2001)

Post by **mark** » Mon Sep 29, 2003 5:53 pm

Hopefully you downloaded the 4.0.x scripts and not the 4.3.x scripts.

There's currently no way to distinguish between form and href urls during the walk. You'd have to add excludes for their urls.

Without more info about what the walk did do and it's settings and log files I can't say much about why it was taking so long. You might want to open a tech support ticket about it.

Not sure why it would submit the same form more than once unless it returned an http failure code. If it returned failure it would be submitted every time it was seen. Maybe that's related to the long time it was taking. Maybe your site goes by various aliases that it was trying to resolve or something?

cindy_walker · Post by **cindy_walker** » Mon Sep 29, 2003 6:02 pm

I did indeed update to version 4.3. I'm rolling back to the original scripts now.

This will solve the form submission problem, at least until the next version of Webinator comes out. Hopefully the next version will provide the option for submitting forms or not.

Post by **mark** » Tue Sep 30, 2003 10:05 am

For reference, you should stick to scripts within your version. If you have 4.0.x, stick with 4.0.x scripts. If you have 4.3.x stick with 4.3.x scripts. The exception is that 4.2 users may use the 4.3 scripts but not all of the new features will work.