Zotero not properly saving paywall content.

solomon.sherlock
I have paywall access to BOF (Business of fashion) and I want to save some articles for later reference/sorting. When I save it using "save to zotero" firefox addon it saves the page as if someone without paywall access would see it.
How do I save it properly?
  • adamsmith
    How are you authenticating to the paywall? Password, through a university proxy, are you on campus?
  • solomon.sherlock
    password and username. had to sign up through university email but don't have to use university proxy to access or be on campus.
  • solomon.sherlock
    Can anyone help? Need to save these pages for my thesis.
  • adamsmith
    The only other idea I have is to check that you allow for third party cookies in the privacy settings of your browser. Beyond that it may just be that Zotero cannot handle the authentication properly.
  • solomon.sherlock
    I'll try to do the third party cookies. How do I do that?

    So zotero doesn't save it by looking on what's cached in your browser? Is it snapshot-ted by a central server?
  • adamsmith
    No, it doesn't go to the server, it goes to the local app, but that re-downloads the page when saving.

    You'll want to make sure that Firefox is set to "Remember History" here: about:preferences#privacy
  • solomon.sherlock
    That's a shame because I already have remember history on.

    Is there somewhere I can lodge a bug?
  • adamsmith
    That'd be here, but I'm not terribly optimistic on this one. Zotero works with standard authentication, so this is an outlier.
    @adomasven might be able to take a look
  • dstillman
    A Debug ID from both the connector and Zotero for a save attempt might be helpful.

    While Zotero does re-download the page, it does so with cookies passed from the connector, which is why this generally works. (For example, if you save this forum page, the snapshot will show you as logged in, even though you're logged in in the browser, not in Zotero.) So if it's not working for BOF, it's possible that the site is doing additional verification checks on the session (say, making sure that the User-Agent hasn't changed). That's pretty rare, and it may be hard to figure out what exactly they're doing without our own access to the site, but if you provide the Debug IDs we can take a look.
  • adomasven
    We actually spoof the user-agent when attempting to download attachments from Zotero, so they are doing something else. Likely won't be able to do much about this without our own access, but a Debug ID can't hurt.
  • solomon.sherlock
    https://pastebin.com/us5AZ5SC

    Is this what you're looking for? The article that I used is at the top.
  • letreupart
    Same issue with Le Monde.
    I have a paid subscription, used from home without proxy.
    When trying to save a page with the connector, the snapshot loads the page, which is redirected to the login page.
    Example:
    - save: https://abonnes.lemonde.fr/actualite-medias/article/2018/03/05/so-press-accelere-la-cadence_5265864_3236.html (at the beginning of the URL, “abonnes” means “subscribers” zone)
    - item saved, with snapshot (snapshot stores the right URL in its metadata)
    - trying to load snapshot: URL loads and immediately redirects to https://secure.lemonde.fr/sfuser/connexion

    Which is strange because it isn't the usual behaviour of the site. If you try to visit the URL without being logged in to Le Monde's paywall, you'll be redirected to https://www.lemonde.fr/actualite-medias/article/2018/03/05/so-press-accelere-la-cadence_5265864_3236.html, where you can see the beginning of the article and an invitation to log in or subscribe.

    (If it can help: this issue appeared when I switched from further version of Zotero [browser integrated version] to the sandalone+connector one)
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