quote:
Originally posted by hdesousa:
Here is my correspondence with AS support.
What part of my posting do you find "nonsense"?
hdesousa@rcn.com
Customer Posted Monday, November 22, 2004, 6:44:25 PM Bid on 5935078781 was placed way too early.
Please let me know what happened!
Sam G.
Support Posted Monday, November 22, 2004, 8:04:43 PM I‘ve forwarded this to engineering. It‘s not clear why this fired early. On rare occasions, we‘ll fire some early pending maintenance. But that‘s usually only for scheduled maintenance times on Friday a.m.---not when this fired.
We‘ll find out what happened.
Our apologies!!!
Regards
-Sam G.
hdesousa@rcn.com
Customer Posted Thursday, November 25, 2004, 10:30:48 AM Hi,
I‘m still waiting to hear from you.
Meanwhile, for my own peace of mind, I‘m using another sniping
site.
regards,
Hansel
Vince S.
Support Posted Thursday, November 25, 2004, 10:59:08 AM We do this if eBay servers are running slow. We monitor how long it is taking them to accept bids. If they are running slowly we put in the bids that much in advance. If their servers then speed back up your bid goes in early.
The alternative is to always place bids exactly when we are told and to miss snipes when eBay slows down. If eBay were 12 seconds slow any snipe of 12 seconds or less would be missed. I think most users would prefer to sometimes have a snipe placed a little earlier than to have their snipe not placed in time and to miss the bid.
Regards
-Vince S.
hdesousa@rcn.com
Customer Posted Thursday, November 25, 2004, 11:34:42 AM I cannot accept this explanation. Your snipe went in almost an hour early, enough time to allow two bidders to try to outbid me. Ebay never runs that slow. I can see a minute early, if necessary, but an hour early??!!
Please try to come up with a better excuse that will assures me this was a non-repeatable mistake, or I will be too reluctant to use your sniper again, in case you make a similar mistake.
Vince S.
Support Posted Thursday, November 25, 2004, 11:47:12 AM We see these happen more frequently on auctions that end exactly on the hour/half hour. More rarely it can happen on those ending exactly on the 15 minute marks.
The reason that happens is because sellers will choose a default auction ending time---which are on the 15 minute mark, rather than specify the exact ending time. So, lots more auctions ending during those times translates into a lot more traffic which causes eBay to slow down and take longer to accept the bids we send.
Regards
-Vince S.
H,
My support answers from Vince have been less than accurate - 1 answer I escalated, another was only .50 and didn't have the time to chase.
I think he is close to the bot that gives the default answer.
A-