When a submission is made to a target site, various checks are done on the output to see what the response was. In the vast majority of cases the submission is fine, but occasionally something goes wrong and you'll see an error message. This article explains what they mean.

Prefetch data error
Success not reported

Both of these errors mean the same thing but they occur at different times. The way success is determined is that the output is checked for particular strings. If the submission gets all the way to the final stage and the success strings are not found you'll see 'success not reported'. Many submissions require what's known as a 'fetch' part way through the process and if this fails, you get the 'Prefetch data error'. Both of these types of errors are logged and investigated and this is how we can improve the integrity of the system. Very often, it is not an error at all - the success was simply reported in a different way to how we were expecting. These are things we can change to improve the success rate over time.

IMAutomator uses a number of proxy servers to connect to the sites being submitted to in order to spread submissions over a variety of IP addresses. Unfortunately proxies are not as reliable as direct server connections and sometimes timeout or don't connect properly causing a server error. We have a mechanism in place which will retry the submission several times before a permanent failure is recorded. These errors tend to vary according to how well the proxies are performing. We are always on the lookout for more reliable proxy servers to improve success rates further.

Also, sometimes sites do stop working and when this happens it will often report a server error. We monitor the performance of all sites and if one of them stops working for a significant length of time without showing signs of a come back, it will be removed. What can sometimes happen in this case is that we don't get an actual server error but the first step of the submission process (the Login) fails, hence a login error.

Internal Server Error
Forbidden
Could not resolve host
Empty reply from server
Connection error

All of these errors come directly from the server of the site that is being submitted to. Most of the time they are temporary glitches - the site is simply being slow or is temporarily down. We retry submissions with these errors several times before a permanent failure is recorded and they are closely monitored and if a site is consistently reporting these kinds of errors it will be removed from the system.

Site is Dead

Websites (particularly the Bookmark ones) come and go and if a site dies or stops working for any reason then we remove it from the system. However, jobs can be scheduled to run over many weeks or even months so this message is given for submissions made to sites which have been removed from the system before the submission was scheduled to be performed.

Duplicate URL

This error is excusive to the Bookmarking tool. Some of the sites are classified more as 'social news' than 'social bookmarking'. The difference is subtle but generally speaking, with a pure bookmarking site, many people can bookmark the same URL but on a social news site only one copy of a URL may be submitted. As IMAutomator is generally used as a method of promoting your own sites, this is generally a rare error. It simply means that you or somebody else has submitted that URL before. You can safely ignore it as it means your bookmark is already there!

Duplicate Article

An article with the same title has been submitted. Articles don't use URL's so the title is used as a check.

Duplicate Title in Directory

The directory has already got an entry containing the same title you have submitted. This doesn't necessarily mean it was your URL - it could be another website with the same title as yours.

Article Too Long / Short

The article was not of the correct length for the site in question. This does not happen very often as we do a word count on the submission form and only submit to sites for which it meets the minimum. This usually happens when the count is calculated slightly differently and it is out by a few words. A good rule of thumb - write your articles a little longer than required. If you are aiming for 400 words, write at least 420.

Invalid Article Text

This is a fairly rare error that occurs on certain article directories that cannot handle special characters in the text.

Deleted for SPAM content

This can be caused either at the point of submission or it can come from IMAutomator's content filtering system. Either way, the error message is the same. Either it was filtered by our software because the subject material is not allowed or it was rejected by the target site because the title or description contains words that are on it's anti-spam list. We have another article which explains exactly what content is acceptable for submission from within IMAutomator but some sites have their own additional policies.

Invalid or Blocked URL

This message means that the URL you have submitted has been refused by the target site for some reason. Unfortunately there is no way to determine what URL's will be refused or to find out why. All we can do under these circumstances is to report the error. It is specific to the target site so you'll often find that a whole load of submissions succeed, and a handful will give you this error.

Held For Moderation

Sometimes the target sites will not submit the bookmark immediately but will hold it for moderation which means that somebody at the target site has to aprove it before it is published. We have no control over this aspect so cannot guarantee that the submission succeeded and so it is marked as a failure even though it may still get published.

Category not specific enough

This error applies to Directory submissions. We have an intelligent system to map our internal categories to the most appropriate categories used by the sites we submit to. However, some directories offer categories but don't let you submit to them. As there is no indication of which categories this applies to, we cannot filter them out easily so when this happens we generate the above error. As a rule of thumb, always try to pick the most specific and relevant category possible for all submissions.