Hello.
I have noticed when bidding on about 300 items that sometimes at 5 second snipe it didnt snipe due to time sync.
I checked a snipe recently and it said it was 22 seconds delay and i have a very fast internet connection.
But other times the snipe is 2-3 seconds delay,
Does anyone know why.
This is on version 2.1 pre5

It’s not the speed of YOUR connection that really matters but delays through the net that bidwatcher couldn’t anticipate.
As I understand it, bidwatcher tries to synchronize your PCs time with ebay time and also allow for delays through the net due to traffic.
I find it does a great job but it can’t be perfect because the internet delay is an unpredictable variable.

However, there is no need to set the sniping time that close to the end time to successfully snipe – all you need is a snipe time short enough so that another bidder doesn’t see your high bid and has time to react to it.
And even then he will only win if his maximum bid is higher than yours

I don’t know if this belongs in this thread, but I am puzzled…. I scheduled a snipe days in advance and with less than a minute before the snipe was to be fired it reset my PC clock back by an hour making Jbidwatcher think it had an hour left before it had to actually fire the snipe. (-sigh-) Luckily I was at my puter so I tried to race against the clock and re-adjust the PC clock to the correct time hoping I could still snipe. Too late, I lost the auction and got “unknown error”. I am using version 2.1pre5

Then when I tried to fire another snipe for a different auction, it fired it 5 minutes too early so I had to reset my snipe again in case I’d get outbid. In this case the PC clock was set to the correct time and was not 5 minutes ahead. This really frustrated me as I prefer sniping so as to AVOID bidding wars and people driving the price up.
Why did this happen??????

PS I wasn’t bidding on anything else and only had 2 snipes scheduled (the ones mentioned above).

- is your internet connection stable lately?
- is your PC clock sync with internet Time servers automatically or set manually?
- did you PC go to sleep (not in your case)
- check your PC PRAM battery and make sure it is in ‘ok’ range, as if the battery is low, some parameters will be mess up such as time/date/internet/personal settings.

Beyond that, I think it should work … oh, try set the sniping a bit longer than a few seconds, sometimes it will help when there’s an internet traffic congestion which happens to me lately a lot.

I have a cable connection and it’s stable.
I have had problems with the clock ever since they changed Daylight Savings time to earlier dates in the spring and later ones in the fall. My puter clock has a tendency to change tiime on Sundays. However I’d been watching for this and it hadn’t happened. It is synced with the windows time server and wasn’t scheduled to synchronize yet. So I do blame this partly on my puter, since it is an older one and only on Windows XP SP 1. I have a “new” used puter waiting, just need time to move files from this one to the new one.

I never touch the time setting on my Mac.
It’s somehow set to sync to some time signal on the net and the switch daylight saving happens automatically.
Never have any synching issues either when sniping – I have it set to 6 seconds and when I check the time on ebay, the snipe either fires with 6 seconds, sometimes 5 seconds left.
Can’t get any better than that.