I love Jbidwatcher, but it seems with eBay bidding parameters a perpetually moving target, there’s never any way to know for sure if a bid will work at any given moment. As in tonight when I lost an auction for an extremely rare item I’ve been waiting to appear on eBay for over TWO YEARS.

How about PLEASE adding a feature to Jbidwatcher that would automatically display a big bold striped WARNING display whenever Jbidwatcher is launched after users have reported bidding problems. Then at least we could bid manually until a patched version is released. (Tonight I checked via Jbidwatcher’s “check for updates” menu item, but it replied my version was up to date. Not really true – there were reported problems and a new beta – updates didn’t report this.)

I’m happy to buy petty penny-ante eBay items in order to be part of the jbidwatcher testing and updating process, but PLEASE – don’t make me play Russian roulette when there’s a critical item for sale.

Greetings,
I can appreciate the frustration, but there is no such warning because problems with the current version of JBidwatcher are not universal, or even necessarily common.

The majority of users are able to place bids without fundamental problems with 1.0.2 still. Certainly it does not recognize the post-bid page correctly, but it does still place the bid correctly.

The predominant issue with bidding appears to actually be something about 1.0.3pre2, which ends up not passing the user’s authentication information to the server, resulting in a ‘please log in’ page during the bid process that it doesn’t expect. This is, among other things, the reason I put out pre-releases, and don’t set the update system to announce them as full releases.

JBidwatcher was correct, when you chose to check for updates, as no stable post-1.0.2 release has been made.

So…what to do here. First, the obvious… If you can, pass along (post here, or email me) the item number, your snipe amount, and if possible the ‘Show Information’ log. Also, if it gave an ‘Unknown error’, then viewing the ‘Show last error page’ information would be helpful, if you haven’t shut down JBidwatcher in the mean time. If you have, the log files might help, but it’s less certain. All this stuff is generally what it takes to understand why a snipe didn’t happen.

At the core, though, JBidwatcher 1.0.2 is still placing bids, for hundreds of people every day.

So tell me what happened, and I’ll see if there’s a way to either identify what went wrong, and if there is something addressable, to try and address it.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!