Support enquiries

Please read below before posting a support enquiry. We get a large quantity of support enquiries, so you MUST follow these rules if you want support.

• Please use the Visual Web Ripper support center for all support inquiries. We no longer accept support inquiries by email. If you make an inquiry by email you will be directed to our support center.
• We don't provide phone support. You cannot call the Support Center and we will NOT call you back if you provide a phone number.
• Free support is limited to bug reports and product feature enquiries. We will also help you with other small isolated issues, but we do NOT teach you web scraping techniques, and we do NOT assist you creating or maintaining projects on an ongoing basis. If you require additional services please visit Web scraping services.
• You must attach your Visual Web Ripper project file if you are reporting a bug related to one of your projects. Visual Web Ripper project files are located in your documents folder "My Documents\Visual Web Ripper\Projects"
• Support enquiries are normally answered within 1-2 business days, but during busy periodes it may take longer.

How to request support

You must install the Visual Web Ripper software before you can request support.

After you have installed the Visual Web Ripper software, you can request support directly from within the software by selecting the menu Help -> Get support

Free support limitations

We have hundreds of customers, some with hundreds of active data extraction projects. If we had to assist everyone developing and maintaining their data extraction projects we would need to dedicate a full time employee to just a single customer in some instances. The low price tag of this software does not cover this level of support, so we simply cannot assist customers creating and maintaining their projects for free. If you want us to assist you developing or maintaining a data extraction project you MUST pay for the service.

Web scraping can be an extremely difficult task on some websites, even for us. If you have none or very little web scraping experience, you will not be able to extract data from all websites without assistance.

We provide basic free support for the product. Basic support includes:

• Bug reports. You must include your data extraction project when reporting a bug.
• Feature enquiries. You can ask questions such as "What does this option do?" or "Can Visual Web Ripper do this?". You'll most likely receive a link to a page in the manual. We do NOT develop sample projects for you to show you how a specific featrure could be used on your target website.
• Specific isolated issues. You must attach a project that illustrates a problem you have with a specific isolated area of a website. For example, you may have a PageNavigation template that doesn't seem to work correctly on a website. If your project is complex, you must create a new project that only deals with this isolated area of the website.

All other assistance is excluded from free support. Please notice these specific exclusions:

• Demo projects are for new users who have just installed Visual Web Ripper and need some extra help to get started with BASIC Visual Web Ripper functionality. This is NOT a service to provide you with free data extraction projects. We do not develop demo projects for existing customers.
• Training. We do not teach you programming, Regular Expressions, XPath or other web scraping techniques. These techniques may or may not be required to extract data from a specific website.
• Please do not send us a data extraction project with a comment that it doesn't work any more and then expect us to fix it. The web is a dynamic environment and a data extraction project may work one day, but not the next day. If we have created a demo project for you, it is your responsibility to maintain the project.
• We do not support issues related to character encoding, unless you are absolutely certain the issue is caused by Visual Web Ripper, and even then we only provide very limited support. We simply don't have test environments for all languages in the world and we cannot spend 2 days setting up a test environment just for you.
• We do not create user accounts on a website to try and replicate a problem you have. We cannot help you if you are unwilling to send us your project with included account details.
• We do not support your back-end systems including databases, even when they are used in conjunction with Visual Web Ripper.

Remote support

We can use TeamViewer to remotely connect to your computer. You will be able to watch exactly what we are doing on your computer while we are connected.

We may request a remote support session if you are experiencing problems with the software that we cannot replicate. We do NOT offer remote support sessions as standard support.

If you want to watch what we are doing while connected to your computer, then you must request a time within Australian business hours (AUS eastern time UTC+10)

In order for us to connect to your computer, you must first download and run the following program (no installation required).

SequentumSupport.exe (2MB)

After you run the program you will be presented with the following screen. You must email the ID to support@sequentum.com and keep running the program until we have completed the task on your computer. The password is only known to us, so you don't need to worry about the password.