Hi Morgan

I love your program.
But I love it so much it drives me crazy when it doesn’t work.

Personlly I think you’re
1) greatly liked and respected
2) underpaid
3) time-poor as a result of (2)

As far as I am concerned there is now an accumulation of bugs which have turned into a plague

1) Auctions being listed as FP – fixed price – when they are not
2) Auctions being listed in the wrong currency and consequent snipe failure
3) No thumbnails – just a grey dot in a square
4) Auctions sometimes being included on the current list, sometimes not
5) completed auctions staying in the current list
6) it is not possible for me to opt for ebay.com – each time I uncheck the box, it get’s rechecked.

So…
If you think these problems are insurmountable due to Ebay’s systems -well lets all battle on I guess.

BUT

If you think with enough time and money you could make your program the joy it once was, here is what I suggest.

Do some crowd-source funding so that you can earn decent money from a program which thousands of us use. I am suggesting you drop the “donate” button and instead do a goal-funding of $50K or up for each new release so that you could just do this and nothing else for a few months.

The more work the program needs at any one time, the more money you are likely to attract. A program full of bugs doesn’t attract a lot of grateful donors I think…

What do you (and everyone else) think?

Merry Christmas

Tim

+1

MERRY CHRISTMAS! ^_

Yeah I don’t think he gets nearly enough donations, for how much money people save using his software. I’ve donated 3 times, and I’d like to more it is just difficult with all the bugs. I think what he really needs is more help maintaining the code, usually projects like this have more then one person working on them, and AFAIK I think he stands alone. I wish I had the time to help out in this respect, but I do not.

While some of us may be willing to “pay” for a working version, I don’t think a substantial number of us would be enough to make it worth to someone who already has a full time job and family to spend 100+hours working on all these bugs. If there’s any java developers out there who have some free time, it’ll take a while to get used to the code, but I’m sure their help picking up this project would be far more substantial.

As always, Thanks Morgan!

Greetings,
I’m so sorry I haven’t been around; my family and I took a bit more than a week off for Christmas, and while I kept tabs on emails coming in for the Tender and Lighthouse lists, I completely spaced on checking the forum.

I usually at least pay attention to the topics, although I very rarely respond.

I once worked out how many folks would need to contribute per year to make me able to work on JBidwatcher full-time, and after a hearty (albeit slightly sad) laugh, I went back to getting work done for my day job.

I don’t push the donation thing much, mostly because I’m terrified that I’ll lose my day job (they love me, but the overall company’s not doing well) and I’ll have to ask the JBidwatcher community for help again like I did in 2009. I hated to do that, and I know my stewardship has been poor of late, but going to the well too many times beforehand would make it even worse.

Time is the most precious commodity I’m lacking, honestly. Figuring out what’s wrong at any given point is a painful dance. For instance recently there was a bug where it only manifested for folks using the non-US site primarily (i.e. ebay.co.uk) to bid on items that were denominated in EUR, that came about because I was recognizing the ‘approximately’ string as the actual price, and it would overwrite the ‘correct’ currency with the converted (GBP) currency. Drilling in and understanding exactly what went wrong was a many hour thing where an interruption would set me back a half hour or more, and I don’t have a lot of many-hour blocks of time available.

That said, 1-3,6 are fixed in the current source base, I believe. 4 and 5 are…fuzzy bugs, unfortunately. I haven’t been able to understand exactly why it happens.

IIRC, this ticket has the most recent download links for the binaries that should fix a number of the problems.

Thank you for thinking of me this Christmas; I hope you all had a wonderfully merry one, and that you have a very happy new year!

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Morgan, I’d like to get your opinion (and the opinion of others here) on the idea of us paying you, say, $1 for each successful snipe. I’d certainly be willing to pay that token amount, and I suspect you would make a decent amount of money that would help you out and offer additional motivation to keep on top of eBay changes down the road.

Riredale

“It is, however, intensely demoralizing to me, having now put over nine years of effort into developing JBidwatcher”

Dude, you just admitted you don’t make squat with it. Release it as open Source. I’ll fix it and you can be the hero. Change your attitude about people ripping you off and welcome others to work with your code instead. Sheesh…..

“$1 for each successful snipe”

I’m sniping gold Jewelry for $1. This would never work for me. LOL!

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Green-Peridot-CLASSY-18k-Gold-Filled-Womans-Rings-US-Size6-A6904-/301132217625

“This person has been doing it since at least May, and has made over $2,000 at my expense.”

I am a lawyer. Your product is copyrighted. I would enjoy suing Tom Campbell for $1M and split the money with you. He is Washington resident.

http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/person.asp?personId=96082015

I wouldn’t be so sure that the peridot in that ring isn’t just glass – seller looks dodgy to me as most legitimate sellers will list decent items priced at a minimum start bid of .99c. The seller also has a negative feedback history for selling fakes.
If you are reselling that item it wouldn’t be too honest to list it as genuine, but for $1.60 it’s a nice trinket.