Hi everyone,
I sent the suggestions off. Below is the text of what I sent them. It's mainly a combination of my 2 earlier posts refined so that I hope things are clearer. There are some new bitches at the end of this post.
Greetings,
This is a bit of a shotgun approach, in that I will mention several things that bother me. Thank you in advance for your patience.
I really like this service. The interface is another story. It's the ‘refresh’ and ‘update prices’ that get me, and this holds true for both the IE pages and AuctionSniper V 1.0.
Refresh sucks. A bit crude but not inaccurate. It often looses snipes (in the display only, thankfully), and doesn’t actually update the information on the page at all as near as I can tell. My work around is to go to a different view (Today, for instance). This usually seems to work reasonably well, though there are times it actually seems to go back to an earlier display that doesn't show changes just made. In this case the only option appears to be to shut down AS 1 or IE and restart.
I noted that syncing clocks will make the time to close counter run for a while, but it soon stops.
Update prices: I'm still showing an active snipe for an auction that closed early ('Buy it now'). By early I mean 2 hours ago. This may be addressing the wrong thing as it relates to updating the status, but I believe it is relevant to price updating as well.
Yes, the prices update when the button is clicked. However, an auction can close early and the snipe for it just sits there. Nothing in the page can make it read correctly or change status to 'ended' or 'lost'. The sole option is to look the auction up on 'My eBay', then cancel it in AS. My preference is for something more dynamic, and my contention is that if the auction is over, then neither the price, nor anything else about the snipe is valid. If an auction has actually closed, I believe that clicking on ‘Update Prices’ should reflect that.
There needs to be a way to have the 'my snipes' page update completely. If that means having it log into eBay to get the current information, so be it.
I understand that, at the end of an auction, the snipe status is supposed to update with the correct information. Please note that I say 'supposed' because I have never let one of these 'ended early' auction snipes run to the end time. So I just don't know. The problem with this, as I see it, is that on a seven day auction with a 'buy it Now' option, an AS user can be sitting around thinking everything is going as it should, when in fact it's quite possible the auction actually ended on the first day. I believe that, for someone who is bidding on something they really want, a week lost when they could be looking for a similar lot would be rather more than an inconvenience.
There is a thing in the support forum saying it isn't done because you're afraid a change at eBay will mess up the text parser and misinterpret valid snipes. I've written parsers before, and it IS hard to hit a moving target. But if it can be written well enough to ensure that changes in eBay don't mess up the sniping itself, then the rest is not rocket science. It's certainly possible to try to parse the status on e-bay, and if a discrepancy is found, change the AS status to read something like Auction MAY have ended early, Please check 'My eBay'. Yes, that's long for the space allowed for Status, but I expect you get my drift. While a person would still have to manually delete the snipe, at least they would know what’s going on.
I'm also not really happy that the Import wizard doesn't get the closing dates and times for auctions. It makes for a fair amount of work comparing the items in the import wizard against the watch list in My eBay, and makes it to easy to make a mistake.
I think that, if AS adjusts the timing of the snipes to cope with slow downs on the web, that info needs to appear on the My Snipes page. Not just that it's happening either, but also the displacement that is currently being used.
To my mind AS V1 (and the AS interface for IE) is about having greater control over what happens when a person bids on eBay items. Without adequate information, there is no control. Having to run IE with My eBay open beside AS to stay current on what is happening is clumsy in the extreme.
Thank you for your time,
David
Okay, new stuff. This is in no way meant to reflect on you folks. It appears that peer to peer help is alive and well in this message board. But, I question the names for the forums if there isn't an active presence from A S staff, and, from your recommendations, I get the impression that there isn't one. At least in this forum. I believe that Sarah, who appears occasionally in 'Customer support' is on staff, but if that's true, she appears to be alone there, and (probably) massively overworked as she seems to post seldom, and the relationship she has (if indeed she has to report things to the development staff) is a bit screwy and, I'm sure pretty frustrating for her. If there isn't someone from the development staff monitoring this forum, then what's the point of it? Shouldn't it be renamed "Peer to Peer help" and change the customer support forum to an area for Sarah to monitor and deal with stuff that the rest of you (or, I guess, us. I've already answered one query.) can't help people with? I started this thread here because I thought from the name that it was the appropriate place to get my concerns to the people at A S. If it isn't, then the name should at least be changed to "Comments".
Your thoughts?
D