| @GChristy: thank you very much for your most excellent post about the problem
of Login Forms over HTTPS. Sharing your research, and documenting it so well,
is truly appreciated.
Although I am a very satisfied user of HTTrack I recently encountered the
Login Forms/HTTPS problem when attempting to download the discussion forums
from an on-line course I recently completed. After spending approximately 5
hours attempting to get HTTrack's Capture URL to get past the login form, I
found your post and it was a life-saver for me. The forum website I needed to
copy was being shut-down within hours as the course had ended.
I don't want to sound like a shill for the MetaProducts Offline Explorer
product that you mentioned, but due to the extremely limited time before my
target website was closed I opted to go the Offline Explorer route. It worked
great for me.
For the sake of future readers who may find themselves in my predicament I
wanted to add a notation to your post that the Offline Explorer product also
comes in a 'standard' edition as well as the 'pro' version you mentioned. The
'standard' edition list price is currently $59 USD. It had all the
functionality that I needed, most importantly as you mentioned, an internal
browser that allowed me to manually login to the target website before
starting an automated download. (note: Offline Explorer is a Windows only
product)
Now that I'm out from under the time-deadline I plan to use your article to
learn how to achieve this functionality with HTTrack. I can only imagine that
HTTPS will become ever more common in websites over time.
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