Solved Scraper stopped to work

[Dm1]

Recalbox scraper can't find any games on thegamesdb now. It worked fine recently, but now it isn't working for about a week or more.
Message from the log:
GamesDBRequest - Error parsing XML.
Start-end tags mismatch

I've done a search and looks like noone is talking about this problem. So I see 2 possible reasons of that:

• It's working for everyone else
• It's a common problem that can't be fixed for now

More likely it's the first one. Is there a good way for me to troubleshoot the issue and find the source of the problem? Maybe it's some kind of rare bug that can be fixed in future for Recalbox.

[Dragu]

@Dm1
When you stand on game selection, Hotkey + Select brings you up the Meta datas and also an option to scrap this game individually. I use it very often because games that exists are not registered under the same name. The database is in this case also the selected in ES menu.

[Dm1]

Yep, I know this trick. The problem is that for me now scraper can't find anything, even if I manually enter for example "Battletoads" it immediately replies "No results, skip".

But if I will use a screenscraper instead of thegamesdb, it works, but screenscraper always had problem with broken images on any Rasbperry Pi OS and is useless in my case. I always used thegamesdb without any problems.

[paradadf]

@dm1 thegamesdb changed his API and they now ask for a personal key, which allows you to use 3000 requests a month. So recalbox will probably remove it from the sources.

[Dm1]

Bad news. But Recalbox users need a good replacement in this case. Maybe fixing screenscraper, so it will not try to use 404 html pages as PNG images, or allowing users to enter their own thegamesdb API keys. Or maybe parsing thegamesdb html, which is kind of a dirty way, but may work if done correctly.

[Dragu]

Scraper becomes really a problem, an is not from Recalbox. thegamesdb is not usable anymore over net, so only solution to login there and transfer manually.

[makination]

Same problem here, bad news. For the front covers thegamesdb was excellent

[Robsdedude]

Why is this marked as solved? This really sucks (no offense to the devs) and it should be fixed or an alternative should be proposed. Or is there really NOTHING that can be done about this?

[Zing]

@robsdedude It has probably been marked as solved since it is not a specific problem of Recalbox, it is a problem with sites that make scrapp, and that makes it impossible to use this tool directly in the system for now. But the developers are working on it, it has not been abandoned, we can only wait for the developers to get a solution, stay arguing about it will not change the situation

[Robsdedude]

How about including Skyscraper. It's written for linux and combines many game DBs/websites.

@Zing, I wan't mainly arguing but asking, what else I could do. Well, finally I found skyscraper that did the job for me.