Something wrong with conditionals?

[merkaba 36]

Really having some strange problems today out of nowhere it seems.

 

I'm running a conditional If..Then statement. What I normally do, is set the statement to search the page ($search page) for a word like Error.

 

If it finds the error, it obviously goes to Then which is left blank so it returns to the start of the loop. This normally worked for me until today. It seems the only way to get it to work anymore is to do the exact opposite and leave else blank and put all the nodes into then.

 

The problem is obviously that if you're searching the page for Error:, or a similar indicator that something went wrong, you're SOL.

 

Anyone else having this problem or know what might be causing it?

 

*update* been playing around and I've come to the following conclusion that $search page is reading non visible text in the page source.

Is there a better parameter to use to see whats ON the page, and read everything IN the page?

[gabel 51]

try and use if exists then

[JohnB 255]

You will come across this occasionally...I just had the same thing...the error messages, images, etc are there whether you can see them or not...You need to look for a different identifier. ($exists will have the same result as $search page)

 

John

[LoWrIdErTJ - BotGuru 904]

I had same thing with $contains

 

and its not finding the containing text from the list item

[merkaba 36]

Took me a while to come up with a way to work around this, and there really wasn't any. The entire page was encoded that way, so the only option I had was to use the conditionals on the next page (account creation).

Like anything else though, it seems it was a can of worms. The minute I gave up on that part of the script, I finished everything else. Ran it, and whenever it would finish and press the button it would do two things :

 

1. Give an error code 999 or something like (the site) probably refusing my proxies
   
2. bounce off the account creation page back to their home page without creating the account
   

 

 

I really wonder if they somehow can tell it's being pushed by a bot or something.

 

So I gave up on that one and attempted to work towards an account creation bot on another site thinking this one would be easier. Long story short, on this site, they somehow coded the forms to have different names every time the page is loaded. One time the e-mail text input was named password, passwordb was first name and so forth. It wouldn't be hard to figure out a way around it, but holy crap it surprised the @#$@ out of me when I figured it out.