Things you should know

Before we continue, there are a few things you should know about SpiderMonki:

  1. If you have a second drive and have not already done so, you should probably change your default folders to point to the second drive. You probably do not want your primary hard drive filling up with content you downloaded from the Internet.
     
  2. The Download Now and Download + List buttons resets all of the queues.
     
  3. SpiderMonki add entries to queues even if you did not select the corresponding queue check box.
     
  4. When you save a queue file, it also saves your main screen settings.
     
  5. If you want to download just one file listed in a queue, you can copy the URL and paste it into the URL edit box at the top and click the Download Now button.
     
  6. It only works with the http protocol. It will not do https or ftp.
     
  7. If it comes across a file with the same filename, it will save the file as filename#.ext, where # is the next sequential number for files with the same name.
     
  8. It will not work well with sites that use Visual Basic Scripting or Java Scripting to prevent programs like SpiderMonki from downloading files. If you can figure out what the URLs are, you can manually create a queue file to download the content.
     
  9. SpiderMonki tries three times to access a server. It may seem like the program is hung, but it's not. The Progress field will display "Sending request...". If you give it a minute or two (sometimes three or four), it will timeout properly.
     
  10. The dialog close button (X at the top right) and Alt-f4 does not work while SpiderMonki is downloading a file or processing queues. You need to click the Stop button and then exit.
     
  11. It does not resume downloads.
     
  12. It is single threaded, but you can have multiple copies of SpiderMonki running. You will need to be sure to save your queue files under different names, otherwise each running copy will try to write to the same queue file.
     
  13. SpiderMonki will miss some href and src HTML tags on badly coded HTML pages.
     
  14. It will rename files with extensions it has not been configured to download. So if you end up downloading a file named virus.vbs, it will rename it to virus~vbs . You can disable this feature by unchecking the rename file extensions check box on the Options screen.
     
  15. If things don't seem to be working right, click the Reset All button and start over again.

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