quote:Originally posted by Camera:
I feel I must come to the defence of AS.
quote:Originally posted by Camera:
I had a similar experience with a snipe placed three days early. Yes, it will cost me - if the "nibblers" get going, because I placed a bid for 2X the articles true worth, as I particularly wanted it!
Am I angry? Why should I be? AS are not privy to any of eBay's commercial secrets. EBay does what it wants when it wants. In this case disregarding the fact that many others use its api. Could they have given notification? Of course they could!
The format of an HTML web page is not a commercial secret. There is no API in use here, simply screen scraping.
quote:Originally posted by MikeD:
eBay made a change to the way their pages are formatting that broke our code used to pick up the end dates of auctions
quote:Originally posted by Camera:
So vent your anger on eBay, not AS.
No. Ebay is working fine. The company that offer a service have stuffed up, completely, costing us real $$$.
quote:Originally posted by Camera:
A moments thought by some of you, would have focused on the obvious. It is not in AS's commercial interests to have a glitch like this.
If you are on free snipes and complaining, I respectfully suggest you get a life!
We have a life, and were hoping to keep it by using a proxy bidder. Unfortunately, we now have to watch that proxy bidder from second to second to ensure it does not completely undermine its intended purpose and cost us dearly in hard earned cash.
AS do not care if they have a glitch like this - it's the gorilla in the room and a little user backlash will not hurt them, or ebay, or the EBay sellers. If they were truly sorry, we'd all have free snipes by now - hardly a cost for them.
quote:Originally posted by Camera:
If you are a long term customer, as some of you are, blowing a fuse when something happens is not the best way to make progess in life. AS have given a reasonable explanation and are generally extremely reliable. They now appear to have fixed the problem and apologised, so what more do you want?
I am pretty sure most people (myself included) lodged a support complaint, and only "blew a fuse" when support told us the issue had been resolved. Well duh. How many times do you have to be told something is broken before you believe it?
quote:Originally posted by Camera:
P.S. I have just trawled the internet for verification. I know many of you say that the explanation given is fiction. It isn't
Major rival's news board:
"eBay made a few minor changes to the item and bid pages this afternoon that caused possible issues when scheduling a new snipe for some items"
[/QUOTE]
All this proves is that neither website have the forethought to check and test the most important (ONLY) piece of information they screen scrape from Ebay: the closing date of the auction. Everything else they do (price, bidder, bidder location, etc) is handled via EBay's responses and would not need to be checked pre-bid.
THE ONLY PIECE OF INFORMATION AS and its competitors have to grab correctly is the closing date. And after doing this for 7 years, they still can't get it right!!?
Here's what the closing date looks like:
ebay.com.au:
<nobr>(02-Apr-08 19:59:20 AEST)</nobr>
ebay.com:
<nobr>(Apr-02-08 02:59:20 PDT)</nobr>
Now, AS would have you believe that they read that value in, got the time exactly right (NB: people's "snipes" are being placed at exactly the right time, but on the wrong date) - believable? Not to me.
And how does EBay changing the date format (assuming that IS what happened), have all the snipes placed as, people have already pointed out, on April Fool's day?
That's right, it doesn't.
ie have bids placed at exactly the right time, but 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 days early? Random numbers of days early, so they all appear on April Fool's day?
It's my conjecture that AS (and its competitor[s]) were PWNT, pure and simple.