OE Enterprise & Pro very buggy

Steve
02/05/2004 03:40 am
I downloaded almost every link from the following website: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jeff_lowder/jury/index.shtml
It`s a very complex site, with many links branching off. One problem that OE had was that it would not snag every link: I browsed the site with OE`s internal browser after the intial DL was complete and noticed that some links had to be manually added to the project. But the worst bug involves the export feature. After having DL`ed the 100 MB site, and after verifying that the links were working in the OE internal browser, I went ahead and exported the whole job to a folder. But when I attempted to browse the exported project I found many dead links. That`s odd (and frustrating!) because those same links were browsable on the OE internal browser. I was curious so I compared the file structure of the website which OE creates BEFORE exporting (in C:\My Documents\OfflineExplorer) to the file structure in the exported folder. Guess what? There were many files and folders which were NOT exported. The dead links corresponded to the missing files/folders. Just to be sure, I manually copied the missing folders from "C:\My Documents\OfflineExplorer" to the export folder to see if that would fix the dead links. It did fix some of them but other links remained dead. Why would OE just arbitrarily skip folders during export?? Amazing.

Now you can respond to this by telling me that I should have made certain adjustments to the settings etc. to get it to work right, but the fact is that I was able to use Offline Commander v2.1 to flawlessly download, export and browse the entire above mentioned site. All without making any special adjustments to any special settings or options.
Oleg Chernavin
02/06/2004 07:10 am
Steve,

Can you please give me few examples of links that were not downloaded? Also, I would need examples of links that were not exported? I will do my best to fix that.

I would appreciate your Project settings - just select the Project, click Copy button on toolbar and then paste it to the forum message.

Thank you!

Best regards,
Oleg Chernavin
MP Staff
Steve
02/06/2004 10:55 pm
Sorry, Oleg. I`ve already uninstalled OE. Just DL all the links from the site above, export the whole site to a folder on your HD and then try browsing a few levels deep. It shouldn`t be long before you find (many) dead links. I tried several different settings thinking that an incorrect setting might be the cause of the problem, but nothing I did made a difference. Anyway, can you think of any setting which would cause folders to be not copied? Such settings shouldn`t exist. I recall some sort of setting which would expedite the export process but I did not select it since it came with a warning about possibly causing some exported links to be corrupted.

By the way, after uninstalling OE Enterprise, I noticed that 2 references to OE remained in the right-click context menu. I had to dig through my registry to find and delete those entries. Your customers should not have to do that.

Good luck figuring out what`s wrong with OE: You`ve got your work cut out.
Oleg Chernavin
02/07/2004 05:29 am
I see that you were using 2.9 version. The bug with MS IE context menu entries was fixed in the 3.0 version. We had also a number of other improvements, so the site should be exported properly with the newest Offline Explorer Pro.

Could you try it again?

http://www.metaproducts.com/download/opsetup.exe

Oleg.
Steve
02/09/2004 03:43 am
I tried the Beta version of 3.0 to see if the export problem had been fixed. It hadn`t.
Oleg Chernavin
02/09/2004 10:02 am
Would you please tell me which exact links were not exported (just few examples) and which pages contain these links. It is not easy to download whole Web sites for me.

Oleg.