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After a few weeks of beta testing, the Octoparse team is rolling out the 8.5.4 update, which brings several new features to the app. These include a revamped account center with a new in-app purchase system, an automatic CAPTCHA solving feature, Octoparse proxies, the ability to download any file from any website, and more.

To begin with, we would like to introduce our new in-app purchase system, which will allow you to purchase additional services using prepaid credits. It is a flexible addition to our subscription model.

The prepaid credits can also be used for the purchase of templates, proxies and CAPTCHA solving services in Octoparse.

For example, template credit can be used on some premium templates that consume extra proxy resources to get stable results. In the past, we set a daily quota for some premium templates and users had to pay a recurring monthly charge in addition to their subscription fees to get unlimited access.

With the new system, we hope to lower the barrier for users who were put off by the usage limit or subscription fees. Users only need to pay for what they use and therefore can budget accordingly.

Starting from 8.5.4, in addition to using your own proxies, you can benefit from the built-in Octoparse proxies to reduce the chance of being blocked.

We have a huge pool of IP addresses around the globe and users can use it to access websites that require your access from certain geographical locations.

>> Learn more on how to set up IP proxies

More and more websites are putting CAPTCHAs forward to limit web scraping. In the past, we could only set a longer wait time for our scraping actions or solve CAPTCHAs manually in the local extraction window.

Not only is the process repetitive and boring, it also means your task will take hours or even days to scale up to a large volume of data. That's why we integrate an automatic CAPTCHA solver that will automatically help you solve CATPCHAs and improve your task workflow.

The feature supports three major types of CAPTCHAs including reCAPTCHA V2, hCatpcha and image CAPTCHA.

>> Learn more on how to resolve CAPTCHAs automatically

As a long-awaited feature, downloading files from web pages while scraping data will be added to the app with the new version. The supported file formats include images, audio, videos, documents and other formats.

You can select any data field in the Data Preview section and download all the linked files into a local folder. This feature only supports local runs for the moment and we will update the feature to our cloud platform in the future.

>> Learn more on how to download files

In this version, we add a new Back to Previous Pageaction in workflow actions to simulate the go back action in a normal browser. This will help solve the issue where users need to go from a listing page to detail pages, but the detail pages cannot be opened in new tabs. Prior to 8.5.4, if we cannot locate a "return to the previous page" button on those detail pages, the workflow will come to a dead end and we'll have to separate the task into two parts. Now we simply need to add the new action to the workflow.

As a small life-of-style update, we upgrade the original cloud live log panel to a completely new cloud run window. Consider this a starting point of our effort to sync the local and cloud experience of our app. You can now check for the task running details in the new window.

The new cloud run window also supports event logs for all subtasks. Octoparse can even take automatic snapshots when certain types of errors occur to help you locate your problems quickly.

If your task involves entering text into multiple textboxes, you can now use an Enter text in Bulk action to fill them all at once. This is extremely helpful in dealing with websites with multiple search boxes.

The update also includes major bug fixes and some minor improvements. By the way, we also bring back an old feature to retry failed URLs during local runs. Users do not have to restart a task when it fails to get results for a few data lines.