What's going on / really annoyed

Brad

It's a well known fact that AS should not be trusted 100% for 'must-haves'...

Your other post was about Bid Groups - was this snipe set up in a previously used bid group. In which case it won't work. Never re-use a bid group. Delete used bid groups.

You'll need to press the UPDATE PRICES button on the my snipes page to get the prices up to their current level (it's annoying but that's how AS works) but no idea (apart from the bid groups idea) why your snipe failed to go...

If all else fails then follow Rick's advice in your last post...

Here's a simile for you about tools. I hit my thumb with a hammer the other day but I didn't throw it away and go back to using my forehead - the hammer is still better (and ususally painless) but I'm a bit more careful now!

R2

It's one thing when the snipe doesn't take because the ebay system is unresponsive, but it's another thing when AuctionSniper doesn't even bother to do the snipe and continues to hold the snipe request in the Active list.

This is the case this morning. Auction Sniper is not providing the sniper service and is not saying it can't. In fact, it is saying it can by showing it in the Active list, and having nothing at all about its failures on the web site.

I've been an active user of Auction Sniper for years and have never seen this before. I did not participate in several key auctions this morning because I trusted Auction Sniper, and Auction Sniper did not bother to place the bid, and in fact the items are still in my active list.

Then when I saw what happened and do not see any information on this site explaining the situation or telling us what is going on, it makes me as angry as the original poster in this thread.

I'm bidding by hand this morning but what about the rest of my Active list - should I look around for an alternative service? And what about the lot I couldn't cancel from Auction Sniper before the 5 minute deadline, that I bid on by hand and won. Auction Sniper bid on that one (unexpectedly?) and now Auction Sniper will claim it as a won auction they delivered and try to bill me for it.

The analogy isn't about a tool like a hammer giving pain because it is used ineptly. The analogy is a service that has matured into a utilility and sells itself as a utility, such as the phone company not allowing call outs just when you need it, or an electric company turning off power for a few hours overnight putting everyone's morning alarm off by a bit.

Auction Snipe is a utility, the same way that ebay has become a utility. It is expected to be there, and has a duty to be there. People depend on it. If it doesn't step up to that reality, then it won't survive.

Thanks for not mentioning my confusion of simile and analogy - d'oh!

I think the old hands have just come to accept that AS has its faults and that AS will never really conquer them despite our best efforts!

Shame really - report these problems as a fault call (via help tab) and who knows, they may give you a few free goes!

R2

Region 2, thanks for the response. No this was not part of a bid group and everything was set ok. It's basically like bye-stuff says, AuctionSniper says that everything is ok, and then just doesn't place the bid, no attempt, no message saying there is a problem (actually still no messages from their management or support people when there was obviously a serious problem), it just didn't bid but unfortunately gave no indication to let me know there was a problem.

Now I've noticed that it has updated the status of this item to "Did Not Win". I clicked on that to find out the definition of it, and that wasn't even listed as one of the statuses.

I'm going back to banging it with my head because clearly this hammer cannot be trusted.

Same thing happened to me last night. AS has been great for years, but am now concerned enough to consider placing my bids the old fashioned way.Not an option I like. A couple of high dollar items end this weekend and I do not want to be shut out. Meanwhile, AS is silent.

Oh yeah, sniper in training? Hmphh.I'm a bloody sharpshooter.

My rant this morning was done while still upset about a nice item going for opening bid, way below what I had registered as my snipe amount, just because AS did not execute the bid, nor explain why it did not execute the bid.

As I said, it's the first time this has happened in tens of thousands of snipes registered with AS.

Brad, Auction Sniper has been extremely trustworthy for many years. It may have become untrustworthy this week. I don't know. I hope what we saw is a recently introduced bug that will get fixed soon.

I'll open a problem report as region2 suggested by way of the help tab. Maybe that will help drive the bug to be fixed.

A dozen snipes in my Action List were executed fine this afternoon.

It's such a nice life having Auction Sniper as a utility - no concern at all about ebay ending times. I like that life, and the comfort of AS being a trusted utility.

Doing the few snipes by hand this morning reminded me of how bad it is to live that way. Whatever happens, I won't go back to hand sniping - I want a dependable snipe utility.

Hey bye-stuff, pleased to hear your logging a support request. Shame that AS are so silent about it, there was clearly something wrong.

I guess I'm more burned because I'm very new to AS and this was the first one I'd done where my bid was above what the item went for (obviously don't know whether i would have won it though). I'm a veteran ebayer but have always done it the hard way, setting my alarm so that i go online, opening a couple of windows and refreshing and putting a bid in in the closing seconds. AS seemed brilliant and I heard about it from a guy who bought something from me, stealing it from a couple of nibblers in the closing seconds. I complimented him on his technique and he told me about AS.

So here I am, and have done a couple of bids with it that weren't high enough to win but it worked well, and then this problem. Given that I haven't had success with it, I just feel like going back to the old way, which, while time consuming, relied on nothing but myself.

But you reckon it is generally good? Maybe I'll give it another chance. What would be good though is if AS isn't working right that it doesn't look like everything is ok.

There is a maintenance period of a couple of hours every Friday night/Saturday morning PST during which AS doesn't fire any snipes. IN THE PAST what AS does for snipes scheduled to fire during that period is to place the bids before beginning the maintenance. Even though this results in "snipes" being placed up to an hour or 2 ahead their desired scheduled time, the theory was the bid placed earlier was better than the bid not being placed at all.

The phenomonon described in these posts raises some questions in my mind:

1) Were these failed snipes scheduled to happen during AS's routine weekly maintenance period? If so....

2) Did AS change something that the early placing of the bids during maintenance did not happen/no longer happen?!?

Just trying to think of a possible explanation....

quote:

I guess I'm more burned because I'm very new to AS and this was the first one I'd done where my bid was above what the item went for (obviously don't know whether i would have won it though). I'm a veteran ebayer but have always done it the hard way, setting my alarm so that i go online, opening a couple of windows and refreshing and putting a bid in in the closing seconds. AS seemed brilliant and I heard about it from a guy who bought something from me, stealing it from a couple of nibblers in the closing seconds. I complimented him on his technique and he told me about AS.

The above posting reminds me of a post I made over 3 years ago that >I< think is worth reviewing HERE.

quote:

There is a maintenance period of a couple of hours every Friday night/Saturday morning ...

I thought it was Thursday night/Friday morning.

My support request got a generic answer aimed at someone losing out because the placed bid was done during a busy time and it missed the end of auction time by a few seconds, with the suggestion to increase the lead time.

That is an interesting problem that is outside the control of AS, but it's not the one this thread is about.

This thread is about having a snipe request in the Active list hours after the auction ended, and AS not executing the requested bid on our behalf. And no explanation and no comment about this happening anywhere on the site.

I've pushed back to get a better answer and the problem is moving up the chain.

When a answer comes back I'll share it here in this thread.

While writing up the push-back I thought of a scenario that explains having a missed snipe request remaining in the active list hours after the auction ended.

It's the simple case of the AS system getting bogged down and not keeping up with the ticking clock. When it comes time to get the set of snipe requests coming due next, the main sniping engine should only consider requests for auctions having ending times in the future (to avoid wasting time handling those with ending times that have passed, since they have no chance to succeed). So, if something happens that causes a lost period of processing time, then requests for lots with ending times in the past are not handled.

Another process that runs occasionally with a low priority can run through active lists looking for requests that aren't handled by the main request processing engine (because of ending times in the past, and other reasons) and this other process then puts the request into the Ended list with the "did not win" label.

This is a consistent scenario with what was seen and with how working systems are designed. I don't know if it is the explanation for the particular case of this thread.

If it is, then the pitch will be isn't that how you'd want it to be - don't you want a system taking care of your live requests and not have the system wasting any resources for requests having no chance to succeed. When things get tight, take care of the living and let the dead alone.

quote:

I thought it was Thursday night/Friday morning.

Oops! I think you're right, Rick! If that's the case, then I'm clueless as to what may have happened with the missed snipes.

The auction ended at approximately 19:15pm Friday Australian Eastern Summer Time, which I believe would have been 12:15am (midnight) Thursday night / Friday morning US Pacific Time.

Is this when the maintenance happens? Does this explain it?

quote:

Is this when the maintenance happens?

Yes.

quote:

Does this explain it?

It shouldn’t. If anything, the snipe should have been placed before 11 PM (Pacific Time), which is when ebay’s, and AS’s, maintenance starts. But then, maybe AS goofed and didn’t get those snipes placed early. If you haven’t already, you might want to file a support request: http://support.auctionsniper.com/.

I had an auction end on Thursday night at 10:15PM PST. My bid was for $60.00 and the item went for $45.00. The explaination given was "Did not win". I have never heard of this explanation before. Did I fall into the black hole of bidding on an auction on Thursday night?

How annoying! Log a support call via the Help Tab!

R2

I've been a user of AS since 01. Never has it been this unrealiable. If we have to start putting snipes minutes ahead of the close, then why use AS at all? I can snipe myself w/in about 10 seconds pretty reliably.

I've lost 2 items, one had NO OTHER BIDS and the other was only a fraction of my snipe amount. Really irritating to lose two items that essentially had no bidding competition.
Both times got the same msg:

Status Summary: Did Not Win
Your snipe did not win because of the reason above

Well NSS. Thanks for the update.

We are paying for the service. If you aren't going to provide the service, do us all a favor and close the doors. At least that way I'll know I'm on my own.

In fairness you only pay when you win - it costs nothing when you don't...

But you're right - I get the impression that the staff are no longer coming here and that AS is just floating around without anyone at the helm.

Send an email to bill@auctionsniper.com- he's the boss!

R2