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Description:

The website I'd like to extract sometimes(not always) shows a modal window.
When a task faces the modal window, it can't work well and fails by time out.
I think I can use "Click Item" action to close the modal window if it always appears but it doesn't always so that the task can't find the item to click and stops.

A:

If you run into some popups, there are three ways to deal with them:

a) If the popup needs to be closed by clicking it, you will need to create a ‘Click Item' action for the close button. It works well for both 'Local Extraction' and 'Cloud Extraction'.

b) If the popup closes when you click anywhere else on the web page, then you need to click anywhere else on the web page and close the setting up windows to continue configuring the scraping task.

If you run the task with 'Local Extraction', you will need to manually close it; 
If you run the task with 'Cloud Extraction', a) solution is suggested.

c) If the popup will be automatically closed after waiting for a few seconds, you can set a longer timeout for the next action while you are configuring your task. Thus Octoparse will wait till the popup disappears before executing the next action.