• A new “ezproxy loop” was engineered for paperbot: the bot now POSTs credentials to a rotating list of university EZproxy servers until it either receives a PDF (detected by the HTTP header “content-type” containing “pdf”) or exhausts the list, then falls back to libgen/sci-hub if all proxies fail.  

• A lightweight Flask micro-service (localhost:8500/plsget) was created to accept credential POSTs, return the PDF bytes, and include a “proxies_remaining” header so paperbot can decide whether to keep looping or stop.  

• Manual validation with python-requests against ScienceDirect confirmed the login flow returns nine cookies and the “Download PDF” string, proving the backend works before integration.  

• Developers noted that Zotero’s current HTML parsing is brittle and floated two future improvements: proxying Zotero through EZproxy or replacing it with native Python scrapers.  

• Paperbot itself was refactored live in-channel into “paperbot v2,” splitting the monolithic code into an orchestration layer (orchestrate.py) and modular fetchers to ease testing, proxy rotation, and community contributions.  

• The session captured iterative debugging of proxy-list cycling, custom HTTP headers, user-agent strings, and fallback title extraction with lxml.etree, all while repeatedly reloading the bot and testing against httpbin.org/get and a ScienceDirect article (pii/S0969804397101233).  

• Logging evolved from ad-hoc IRC chat messages to a formal `_log` function and finally to structured debug output, illustrating the tension between rapid IRC hacking and maintainable open-source tooling.