Scrapebox Troubleshooting

This means your data is bad, most likely your emails are invalid like no @ symbol or no .com on the end or similar.

You may encounter error codes as you use scrapebox.

Most error codes are simply standard internet error codes that you would get if you were using a regular web browser. Examples would be anything:
1xx, 2xx, 3xx, 4xx, 5xx

Error code 0 -  generally means you have bad proxies or you have misconfigured something in scrapebox

For a explanation of error codes choose the help menu in scrapebox:

Help -> Server Error Code Reference

When trying to access a Yahoo service (i.e. Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Groups, Yahoo News, Yahoo Search or Siteexplorer), you receive the following error message:

Unable to process request at this time — error 999 Unfortunately, we are unable to process your request at this time. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please try again later.

Operating System: Any.

Background: This error appears to be a “catch-all” error code that Yahoo serves up when it doesn’t have a more specific error code. It essentially means “Oops! Something went wrong but we don’t know what, so we’ll just say that Error 999 occurred.”

The most common reason for receiving Yahoo Error 999 is due to some sort of bandwidth limiting system that Yahoo has put in place on their servers. Once you have exceeded your allotted bandwidth for a specific period of time Yahoo gives you this Error 999 message and doesn’t allow you to access the service. People have primarily reported receiving this error when they try to access Yahoo Mail or Yahoo Groups, but other Yahoo services may also be affected.

Why has Yahoo done this? There are two reasons that I can think of:

1. To prevent DoS (Denial of Service) attacks.
2. To stop automated tasks from hammering their servers with hundreds of requests a second.

There are many programs around that offer to automate access to various Yahoo services, i.e. check your Yahoo mailbox every 5 minutes, archive Yahoo Groups messages, download files from the Yahoo Groups Photos and Files sections, etc. If you use one of these automated tools then there is a very real possibility that you will run into the Error 999 message. Normal human usage of the Yahoo services shouldn’t normally generate enough traffic to trigger the Error 999 message unless you’re a very heavy user.

It appears that Yahoo uses your IP address to track the amount of traffic you’re generating on Yahoo, and once you reach the limit you get blocked by the Unable to process request at this time — error 999 message. Once triggered you will find that your IP address has been blocked for a period of time, somewhere between 2 and 24 hours usually.

Generally speaking when you have a problem with scrapebox these are the best steps to follow.  Work thru them until your problem is resolved.

1.) Restart your computer

2.) Update scrapebox to the latest version if there is an update available.  Sometimes things change with Google, or Wordpress etc...  and the updates fix these issues.

3.) Take a moment to go back thru your settings and double check all of the most obvious things.  Often a simple setting can cause great grief.

4.) Reinstall Scrapebox.  Completely delete all of the scrapebox operating files (of course back up any files you are working with, like your names, emails etc... You only need to delete the actual scrapebox files that come with scrapebox originally when you download it).  Then re-download the latest version of scrapebox and try it.  (download here: http://www.scrapebox.com/payment-received)

5.) If all else fails try posting in the sales thread where you purchased scrapebox to see if the user community can help you (if you purchased on a forum),  or you can try the sales thread at BHW, they are very helpful: http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/buy-sell-trade/129096-scrapebox-ultimate-serp-scraper-auto-blog-commenter-prstorm-mode.html

6.) If that doesn't help then you can contact support directly: http://www.scrapebox.com/contact-us

All scrapebox servers are monitored by Pingdom 1 minute monitoring.  Scrapebox has multiple servers, the publicly monitored ones, including the scrapebox licensing servers an scrapebox.com can be found in the Pingdom summary below.

Pingdom summary of Scrapebox servers

There are many reasons why scrapebox can freeze or hang.

Before figuring out what is causing Scrapebox to freeze, you need to identify what type of freeze is happening.

Black Window -   If your Scrapebox window has gone completely black, then generally it means that it froze up because of a lack of resources.  You ran out of available processor power or you ran out of Ram.

You can also see a black window if you are using RDP to connect to a remote server such as a VPS or Dedicated server.  This happens because your pc and the server just aren't exchanging data fast enough.  Generally if you leave this alone it will fix its self, or you can log out of your RDP session and log back in.  If you are constantly getting black windows using RDP, then its either your pc or the server just doesn't have enough resources, or the internet connection is too slow or too busy.

If your constantly getting black windows on your local machine then you probably need a better processor or more Ram or you need to not run so many things on the pc at once.

Sockets/Ports waiting - As you run scrapebox, windows opens up connections and closes them.  The is true for almost every part of scrapebox, its how windows works.  If you have too many connections going and windows doesn't correctly close down the open connections they can stay open until the TCP timer shuts them down.  If this happens, windows will open all of the available ports that it can allocate.  Meaning all ports are open, not being used and you can't do anything.

When this happens the ScrapeBox window can be moved around and everything appears normal, but the numbers of posting/scraping etc... don't go up, they just stay at what they are.  This behavior is especially true with free proxies and more prevelant in machines running versions of windows prior to Vista Service Pack 2, including XP.  Although Vista and 7 are still susceptible to this.

The fix here is to turn your connections down and your timeouts up, or if it never kicks in, then restart your pc.

White Ghost Window/Not Responding - There is a white ghost window over top of the scrapebox window and it says (Not Responding) at the top.  This generally means that scrapebox is just busy and is not currently able to display the window.  Most of the time if you leave it alone and give it some time, it will come back and everything will be fine.

If leaving it alone isn't fixing the problem then you can check out the following reasons that its freezing.  Here are the most common ones:

• Malformed data
• Antivirus / Firewall Software
• TCP stack
• Resources

Malformed data

This includes anyfiles you load into scrapebox. If you have malformed urls, such as:

http:/ww.go/bad-data

or if you have poorly spun text.

{anchor1||anchor2|{

This could be in any of the fields.

Checking for Malformed data

Back to basics - Create a new names file, new emails file, new comments file, and new websites file.  Put only one line of text in each file. Do not use any spun text.  If you are able to comment to the same list that was freezing before then its likely it was somewhere in your names/emails/websites/comments files.  If scrapebox still hangs then its likely that the issue is in the blog list you are trying to comment to and you need to check for bad urls.

URLs - Uncheck the "Randomize comment poster blogs list" under settings. Then post with scrapebox. When it freezes note the position where it froze. Like list status 500/4563. Then also note your connections settings, for instance if you had 50 connections going at once.

Then import your list into the blog commenter section and hit the E. Then look for line 500 or wherever the list stopped at. Then look at 50 ulrs before and after that line (or whatever your connections were set to). If you find any malformed urls fix or delete them.

Malformed urls can be anything that is not formatted right.  Like: http:/ww.go/bad-data

Spin Syntax - Load your files in the commenter section.  Hit test comments.  Hit the spin again button 20-30 times rapidly.  If scrapebox locks up you likely have bad spin syntax coding.  Note that just because it doesn't lock up in this step doesn't mean that your spin syntax isn't the cause of scrapebox freezing and you should manually double check it.

AntiVirus / Firewall Software

Antivirus and Firewall software can shut down scrapeboxes access to the internet and cause all sorts of issues.  The simple solution here is temporarily disable all Antivirus and Firewall software including windows firewall and see if solves your problem.

TCP Stack

Half-open connections limit can cause an issue.  Generally this is only true if you are running Windows Vista SP1 or older, including XP.  The default half-open connections limit was removed by Microsoft in Windows Vista SP2 and newer, including Windows 7.  If it’s a half-open connections problem, Windows Event Viewer will show an event saying "TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts".  If this is the case you just ran out of available connections.  The quickest fix is to restart your pc.  If you keep having this issue, then try running less simultaneous instances of scrapebox or turning your connections down and your timeouts up.  Upgrading to Vista SP 2 or newer will ultimately fix this problem.

Resources

Lack of resources can also cause this.  Not a fast enough processor, not enough RAM.  Quick fixes here are to not run as many instances of scrapebox at once, not run as many other things in the background while you are running scrapebox.   Turn your connections down, and your timeouts up.  Don't work with as large of a list.  Most of what scrapebox does is stored in memory(RAM) and the larger the list you work with the more space this is going to take.  If the memory fills up, things can go bad.

You can of course always upgrade your processor/RAM.

Back to Basics

In general its important to remember the basics, especially when none of the above works.

• Restart the pc
• Reinstall Scrapebox - http://www.scrapebox.com/payment-received
• Restart your modem
• Restart your router

When all else fails

You can either contact support: http://www.scrapebox.com/contact-us

or

Take a nap.

or both.  :)

If you are scraping a engine, especially Google and you are not getting any results, its generally due to one of a couple reasons.

1.) The terms you are scraping simply do not have any results to return.  For example if you manually go to Google.com and search for:
inurl:car inurl:house inurl:cat site:purple.com purple cows

Google is then going to return this:
Your search - inurl:car inurl:house inurl:cat site:purple.com purple cows - did not match any documents.

So if you put that same string into scrapebox its not going to harvest any results either.

2.) Your proxies are blocked or some other error is happening.  The easiest way to check this is go to the settings menu.  Uncheck "use multi threaded harvester".   Then try to harvest.  Scrapebox will display each query, the proxy used and the result, including any error messages.

If you see lines that say:
Results 0 completed using proxy xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:xxx   - then it means that the request finished, but the engine returned no results, same as it would do if you actually went to the engine and manually searched for it.

If you see:
Results 0 Error xxx received using proxy xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:xxx - Then you can look at the error message and generally determine the problem.  Most common for this one are:

Error 302 - Your IP is blocked
Error 404 - the proxy is bad or was never found
Error 407 - your proxy need authentication, if your using private proxies you need to get with your provider to see if you need to use IP authentication and how to do it, or if you need a username and password

Login,Failed - This means that the blog requires you to login in order to post a comment.  Since Scrapebox does not support this, the post failed.

Error 17 occurs when the checksums don't match. This essentially means that the file is corrupt and you need to redownload it. This can happen when you download in the first place, if it gets corrupted in transfer, or while unzipping etc... Windows does many things in the background and sometimes this just happens. Simply redownload a fresh copy of scrapebox from the download link:
http://www.scrapebox.com/payment-received

If the problem persists then you should try using a different unzip program, you can google for this, there are many free ones.

If you receive error 18 it means that a debugger is running when scrapebox is started.  Please close down the debugger and then start scrapebox.

99% chance you submitted the wrong info.  Make sure you submit the correct Paypal transaction ID.  You can find your transaction ID in paypal, here is a video that shows you how:
http://www.youtube.com/user/looplinescrapebox#p/u/9/k8PWovAQaiU

Also make sure you submit the email address that the money was sent from.  It is the email that you received the "thanks for purchasing scrapebox" email too.  Also it is the email address that paypal has labeled as "primary" in your paypal account (unless you have changed your primary email address since you purchased).

Else if you submitted the correct info then it could be that a anti-virus or firewall is blocking scrapebox from reaching the authentication servers to activate your license.  Go to help >> test server connection and see if you have 6 green lights.  If you do not have all 6 lights green then you need to find out what is blocking scrapebox.  Make sure you add allow rules in all of your anti-virus/malware checkers/firewalls for scrapebox.

There are many anti-virus, malware checkers and firewalls on the market, but some are particularly problematic and if your having issues with scrapebox connecting to the activation servers and/or your server test has red lights and you have one of these programs running you should pay particularly close attention to it cause it could very well be the cause of the issue.

Anti-Virus:
ESET/Nod 32
AVG