Is it time to fire the programmers at AuctionSniper.Com?

Are you still there?

I understand your frustration, and I can sympathize with you're being mad.

I have three suggestions:
1) Click here to file a support case: http://support.auctionsniper.com/
2) Perhaps someone else will help you.
3) I can supply you with a link for free snipes?

Hope that helps.

Rick

Last time the sql server stopped responding the problem lasted in excess of 4 hours.

If there was support they could quickly answer whether the problem led to snipes not being placed or just the mysnipes are unavailable.

No response to opening a support ticket after an hour.

I don;t know whether to proxy bid by auctions or whether the snipes will be placed. I certainly don;t want to pay for snipes I have proxy bid, but I want the items.

Hardware fails, software is buggy, that's why prompt and intelligent support and info is need.

This is strike 2 for auctionsniper. Three strike and ...

Yeah, I had sent a support ticket into support, and I got a reply back that failed to explain at all, as to why my snipes didn't go through. Basically I was told that they didn't know what caused the snipes to fail being submitted.

They thought that the only reason why the snipes failed was because I had previous wins in that folder. But holy heck, those previous wins were from 3 weeks ago, for one, and for another thing, then why, when I set the snipes up, did it show a "Ready" status.

Its just bad programming, I believe, and I'm an IT person with 23 years of programming experience!

Just went through getting the same error messages and then lost out on an auction at less than my set maximum.

What gives?

I'm new to this "product" and I am very unimpressed. I could have at least attempted to top the bid manually if I were aware it wasn't going to work!

VERY FRUSTRATED!

As a long time member of the Information Processing community (since 1967), I have come to terms with the fact that almost every site on the Internet suffers from bad programming. None of the techniques for managing software design and implementation developed over this period appear to be implemented on the net.

There is no testing, release procedures, design reveiw etc etc.

As a realist I have come to reluctantly accept this reality. But there are web sites which quickly respond to problems and outages, and some that make their users aware of status and the extent of the problem. AS is not one of these and will pay the price of inadequate support in the long or possibly the short term.

There are other alternatives and one of them might understand the importance of customer support.

Yeah, but I was just reading in an IT industry trade magazine, about the huge wave of programming projects that are leaving the US for places overseas, and that the MAIN reason for this is of course the cost savings to the companies, but also the allegedly failure rate of programming projects here in the US as opposed to those over seas, in countries like India, Pakistan, Japan, China, and other countries.

Specifically, the US has over a 70% failure rate of IT programming projects, compared to an average rate of just 38% in most overseas countries (who do a lot of programming outsourcing work).

Going overseas, geographically reduces the risk of daily feature enhancements (read as catastrophic failure) implemented by large companies such as Ebay.

And since work is to contract, the lawyers might just get a contract written which requires professional standards for development procedures, testing and acceptance.

Even over 20 years ago the only way many corporations could implement successful IT projects was to contract them out.

Keene Associates, CSC, EDS and even Arthur Anderson exceeded their customer's software develiopment capabilities. I'm sure you can name some more contractors.

From tobaccocard:

"Going overseas, geographically reduces the risk of daily feature enhancements (read as catastrophic failure) implemented by large companies such as Ebay."

Going overseas means that the companies are saving millions, while thousands of Americans continued to be pushed out of their jobs!!

We've lost most of our US domestic jobs in manufacturing, in the service sector, in the banking, financial and customer support areas, and now the "gold rush" is on for all of these IT companies to push their programming projects off shore.

In fact, in a different article in ComputerWeek, it states that by 2006, nearly 80% of all US IT programming projects will be done by overseas companies.

HELL, PRETTY SOON THERE WON'T BE ANYONE WORKING IN THE US, EXCEPT FOR THE ILLEGAL ALLIENS WORKING ON THE FARMS!!

Post an acknowledgement of the problem in the "News and Updates" forum!!!

I know there's been at least one other "outage" in the past month, but the "News and Updates" forum has nothing posted since May 13th (and that was AFTER it was fixed).

In the past, I've been very conscientious about saving screens and posting an error report so that the techs can have as much info as possible to help fix the problem, but not any longer. If they can't be bothered to monitor things and to post a short announcement saying "We know it's down. Check back here to find out if/when it's been fixed." then why should I spend my time trying to give some assistance? I'm already giving them my money, and if this keeps up, that will stop too!

I'll turn myself down now to a low simmer...

I've had the same problem as well... getting frustrating!

There's an old saying...."You get what you pay for". I got exactly that yesterday. Sat here at work ready to watch my winning bid report come in and what did I get? Exactly what I paid for.

I believe maybe I'll try one of the other sniper sites next time.

C

It must be bad programming when a bidgroup folder works exactly as it was designed to do! After all, it IS such a simple concept.

1) set up your folder to win X amount of auctions
2) enter auctions to be sniped
3) AS snipes entered auctions until X amount of wins are achieved
4) AS STOPS sniping since X amount of wins have been achieved

Done Deal.

I'm no IT person w/23yrs experience, but it all seems pretty simple to me. Of coarse, maybe that's why I wouldn't assume that the folder would somehow magically forget it had already achieve X amount of wins and start allowing snipes to be placed again. But then again, I did take the time read the bid group tutorial, and I did see the status of "1 of 1" wins still posted next to my bid group folder when I bothered to look at the screen listing my folders. Otherwise, I would have put more auctions in a folder that already had a win, expecting the folder to allow more snipes.

Yeah, I'm pretty simple, so I'm glad the concept, directions and execution is simple. I'm glad I don't have to assume things that just aren't there.

As a programmer, I know that to write the perfect software you have to outguess anything that any user will ever do - an impossible task!

It seems that the programmers failed to imagine that Johny User would create bid groups, add in snipes, win items and then, 3 weeks later, try using the bid group again.

In fact, they're probably tucked-up in bed with the assumption that no-one would be so stupid as to try that obviously ridiculous and illogical method of re-using a bid group. Hang on, I'm an IT person and I've tried to do just that! Doh!!!

Hopefully, now that this has been highlighted they will set up some sort of flag that will not allow the use of a bidgroup if it has been used and satisfied it's criteria (ie. one item bought or whatever). Or put up a message. Or something. Anything that will stop people trying to reuse the bidgroup and being disappointed when they don't win.

Action: Support

Here we go, there's always that smart ass in every crowd (I meant star_trkr - with all do respect, of course).

First of all, the "errors" that I was referring to earlier were the servers errors that kept popping up the other day when everyone was trying to access their WINS information. And from reading some previous threads, it appears that there's been a lot of programming problems lately with AuctionSniper.Com, which has caused people to lose out on auctions.

Secondly, with regard to how the Bid Group works, yeah, I realize that, with the way the Bid Group functions now, that if you set up a folder for ONE win, then once it wins an auction it will cancel all of the other CURRENT auction snipes posted in that folder. That's fine. NOW THAT MAKES SENSE. That's logical! And that's how it should work.

But once the auctions have all ended, and these old auctions are no longer in the Bid Group folder, or any other current auctions in that folder, then those same rules should apply to the next new group of CURRENT auctions that you post to that SAME folder.

So if someone would post four more NEW auctions to that folder (after its been emptied of all of the previous auctions), then when one of the auctions wins, ONLY THEN should the other CURRENT items in that folder automatically cancel.

NOW THAT MAKES FRIGGIN SENSE, AND THAT'S THE WAY THE PROGRAM SHOULD BE DESIGNED!!!!!!!!

It doesn't make any sense to have to go and delete an empty folder once all of the previous auctions have been closed and eliminated from the folder, and then only have to re-open a new folder for every time that you want to use the Bid Group function.

UNDERSTAND what I'm saying here!?!?

And the reason why an end user may want to have several different Bid Group folders, in different colors, is so that he can setup a bunch of auctions that are grouped on several similiar items (i.e. Orange-car stuff, red-camera stuff, blue-computer stuff, etc., etc.), without having to go through the steps of deleting and re-creating a new folder each and every time!!

You don't create a new folder each and every time for your normal auction snipes, so why should you have to for each time that you want to use a Bid Group function? Especially when there are no longer any CURRENT auctions opened in that folder!

I'm I making myself clear here?

This is were the programming department lacks some common logic in the design of the Bid Group function!

Am I wrong?

[This message was edited by EightBall on July 04, 2003 at 12:14 AM.]

[This message was edited by EightBall on July 04, 2003 at 12:18 AM.]

Ok fine, then have the "used" Bid Group folder then automatically delete off of the end user's section.

I mean if you have to delete it and re-enter it to use it again (assuming you want a 1 win situation again) then why doesn't the system either RESET the folder to be able to enter new items into it, OR then automatically delete the folder after the close of all of the auctions, so that the enduser can't re-use that folder?

Hey, I got it!! Now I know exactly what to do with all of those left over bottle rockets!!