Hi Morgan,

since a week or so eBay has introduced a ‘security feature’ that looks like this:

A regular login attempt (with correct data) fails, instead an extended login screen appears which requires entering a touring number besides the usual data (username and password).

JBW seems to recognize this — at least a short popup informs me about the prog not being able to login.

However, there does not seem to be a workaround.

I’ve tried deleting all cookies and temporary internet files — no avail.

I’ve tried logging in manually to ebay.com as well as ebay.de in IE7 as well as in Opera (my standard browser), all four simmultanously — no avail.

JBW keeps saying ‘Not logged in’, bids and snipes do not fire, the only function that is performed is listing and updating of items.

Is there any workaround for this problem? I’m perfectly willing to perform a manual login once a day, however I’ve got no idea how and where.

I’ld be glad for any hint on this.

Sincerely,

Therese

Greetings,

This is called a ‘captcha’ (normally capitalized, but I’m too lazy this time). Unfortunately there is no workaround right now. :(

The way to handle this is to shut down JBidwatcher, log in through your browser normally, and browse around on the eBay site normally for a little while. Leave JBidwatcher down for a day or two, and then start it back up again, and it should be good.

eBay’s security monitoring goes away if everything’s been fine for a day or so, so that’s the only absolutely certain solution I know. I’m poking at ways to prompt the user when a captcha has been encountered, and other ways to reduce the number of times that JBidwatcher logs in, but in general they’re all ways to reduce the instance of captcha’s getting triggered on a given account, not ways to actually handle the captcha’s themselves.

For more FAQ info on this: http://www.jbidwatcher.com/help/faq.shtml#ans9

Hope that helps!

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Hi Morgan,

thanks for your reply and the ifno it’s a CAPTCHA, not a Turing number.

What about JBW not logging in every single time a bid is scheduled, but simply
keeping logged in for twenty four hours.

As eBay is offering such a choice in their login screen it should be possible
for JBW, too — and should reduce the number of logins per day significantly.

Sincerely,

Therese

Hi,

for fighting against eBay’s captcha sabotage please see:

• http://forum.jbidwatcher.com/forums/7/topics/1174
  Technical solution (eg. asking user to decipher the hieroglyhps)

• http://forum.jbidwatcher.com/forums/4/topics/1175
  Social solution: bombing ebay support and forums

It’s been almost 2 years and this is still a problem. Granted, I’ve never experienced it before today… ever.

But it seems quite ridiculous that JBidwatcher still fails to login because a CAPTCHA was presented. We really should be showing that CAPTCHA to the user and letting them respond, rather than barfing a confusing error and expecting the user to find the FAQ.

That said, it’s been a rare and minor problem for me. It only happened once (today) for some reason and, after reading this page, I closed JBidwatcher, logged in with Firefox and browsed around a bit, and within 20 minutes tried JBidwatcher again, it worked and fired off a successful snipe for me about 10 minutes later. Still, if some users are requiring up to a day to re-open JBidwatcher… really, we need to incept, display, and allow the user to respond to the CAPTCHA.