Greetings Morgan,
I’ve noticed that in the past few days, JBidwatcher is unable to load the Mature Audience items in the Watched auction list. All other items load fine.

Might this be related to the eBay Security Measure page, which asks for a Sign In Verification Code and which I’ve only seen appear on the web interface this past week – only for MA items?

Apparently, this page has been around for awhile, but this is the first time I’ve actually been hitting it at the eBay site:

http://pages.ebay.com/help/newtoebay/verificati…

These seem to be the relevant JBidwatcher error.log lines:

Tue Mar 18 01:06:23 EDT 2008: Failed to load auction title from header: “Security Measure”
Tue Mar 18 01:06:23 EDT 2008: Failed to parse auction! Bad return result from auction server.
Tue Mar 18 01:06:23 EDT 2008: Not loaded (url http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&i…).

Thanks.

I should add that the above problem means that I cannot see any Mature Audience watched or bidding items in JBidwatcher, any longer.

This is on 1.03 pre2.

Given that the error msg mentions “Security Measure”, I’m rather confident that this new Sign In Verification code page is the culprit. If so, I have no idea how JBidwatcher will be able to reasonably get around it, since the Verification code to type in requires interpretation of a graphical or audio object.

The Verification code/Security Measure pages have not been cropping up for some time . . . until now, again. So, I’ve lost out on bidding various auctions because 1.03pre2 wasn’t able to properly jump through the two verification page hoops that eBay threw up, recently.

A couple considerations for Morgan:

1. At the very least, a proactive notification from JBidwatcher that it cannot authenticate or obtain a page/session upon the next session refresh, time synch or auction update would be appreciated. This would be helpful far in advance of the auction closing, when possible, i.e., whenever it initially occurs.

2. To get around the verification code input need, could JBidwatcher provide a quick image capture of the code from a Security Measure page, allow manual input into its own interface from the user (for which it prompts) and then submit that code in the form? Or, some other design which allows for the screen scraping to get beyond the verification code step successfully.

eBay doesn’t specify the exact conditions as to when they will periodically throw Security Measure pages in your face, though my guess is that they have some site metrics which guess at automated program use by different accounts – based on the timing of different actions taken through that account. At least, that would explain why I experience these bothersome “features” periodically.

Thanks