Question

We have a Google Mini search appliance to index parts of our corporate intranet.

We'd like to get our google robot to index selected parts of the FogBugz contents - some cases (but not all of them), forums, and wikis, plus the static content such as the FogBugz manuals.

The Google Mini does not appear to support logging in to web services and keeping track of the cookies. Our FogBugz requires logging in with a password in order to view anything.

Our FogBugz installation is also facing the public internet, so we need some form of reliable access control so our content doesn't get indexed by the public googlebot.

Is there a way to set up a FogBugz account with a permanent authentication cookie? It is possible to enter static cookies in the googlebot.

Answer 1

I don't know much about the Google Mini appliance but if you can tweak the urls that it follows (or create a sitemap type listing using the api and feed it to it) you could do this.

For example, let's say you wanted to just log on and view the list of bugs.

Normally this url would be

http://yourfogbugz.com/?pg=pgList

But if you don't have a logon cookie you can change it to

http://yourfogbugz.com/?pg=pgList&pre=preLogon&sPerson=youremail&sPassword=yourpassword

Normally if you look at a bug the url would be

http://yourfogbugz.com/?123

(where 123 is the bug number). This is actually a shortcut url for FogBugz. The full url looks like this:

http://yourfogbugz.com/?pg=pgEditBug&ixBug=123

So in order to view it cookieless you would add

http://yourfogbugz.com/?pg=pgEditBug&ixBug=123&pre=preLogon&sPerson=youremail&sPassword=yourpassword

Essentially, you just add

&pre=preLogon&sPerson=youremail&sPassword=yourpassword

to the query string and that should work for most pages.

This is entirely undocumented and unsupported but FogBugz has worked this way for a long time, so I don't see this changing very soon.