I'm not sure if this is the right forum to post this in, but here goes:
We have a company that's supposed to be doing a site crawling service for us to check for broken links, mis-spellings, compliance, etc...
They are unable to authenticate using a PERL cURL POST and believe that javascript is in use during the authentication process. Here are the steps they are taking:
1. We use a PERL cURL request to get the contents of http://www.yoursite.com
2. Scrape the contents of http://www.yoursite.comfor the input hidden field values needed for the authentication POST.
3. Obtain the session cookies on the http://www.yoursite.com for use with the POST
4. Submit a PERL cURL POST to http://www.yoursite.com containing all of the parameters/cookies. (See the attached POST.txt for more details on the POST parameters/cookies used)
After doing the steps above we get a Response back from your server, I’ve attached the body of the response (response.txt).
The fact that we failed to authenticate after the POST and that I spotted some javascript in the request that appears to be login functionality leads me to believe that JavaScript is required to login to your site. Unfortunately our crawler cannot execute JavaScript during the authentication process. We can only submit POST’s with specified values (or hidden values).