SWEC (Simple Web Error Checker) is a program that automates testing of
dynamic websites. It parses each HTML file it finds for links, and if those links are
within the site specified (ie. local, not external), it will check that page
as well. In this respect it works a lot like a crawler, in that it'll click
on any link it finds (more notes about this later).
In addition to parsing and locating links, it will also parse the pages looking
for known errors and report those (such as Mason or PHP errors), and will report
if a page can not be read (by either returning a 404, 500 or similar).
Since you may often want SWEC to be logged in on your site, you have to be
careful. When logged in, SWEC will still click on all links it finds, including
things like 'join group' or 'delete account' (though it has some magic trying to
avoid the latter). Therefore it is highly recommended that when you run SWEC as a
logged-in user on a site, use a test server, not the live one.
Running SWEC on a live site without being logged in as a user is perfectly fine,
it won't do anything a normal crawler wouldn't do (well, not exactly true, SWEC
will ignore robots.txt).
