I've written a screen scraper to download and then remove private messages from an ikonBoard account, and one for the message archive and file archive each for Yahoo Groups. The former was done with plain LWP and judicious use of HTML::LinkExtor, the latter are WWW::Mechanize apps. Even so I don't really have much to say about the issue - they were all completely cookie-cutter, entirely uneventful jobs with the aid of Perl and CPAN. If WWW::Mechanize::Shell worked for my Yahoo tasks, the respective scripts wouldn't even have required any manual "reverse engineering" of pages and so would have been downright boringly straigthforward work.

Makeshifts last the longest.