Topic: That's so meta... / Error: 'null(FP)' instead of the current bid

Greetings,
This thread was about a different problem.

That said, if you can replicate the problem with 2.2pre1 I’d really like it if you’d look in your auctionsave/ directory for the item number that didn’t parse right and attach that to a support ticket.

In any case, there’s another thread where more folks had chimed in, so I’d prefer the conversation mainly stated over there so the most people can stay up to date.

Thanks, and best if luck with your auctions!

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / problems after upgrade

Greetings,
Iced Tea is known to have problems with Swing (UI) and SSL certificates; just like RedHat started shipping with a broken JRE (back then it was libgcj) it sounds like SuSE is shipping a not-ready-for-prime-time Java runtime. Use the Sun/Oracle JDK as @bassdart indicated for the best results.

I’ll note that your time delta with eBay is almost exactly an hour, so it’s also possible your time zone or DST setting is incorrect. I don’t recall if an hour will cause SSL problems, but I know that at a certain amount of time difference, the SSL signatures become invalid. (So if your clock is off by a day, it’ll definitely break SSL. If it’s off by a minute or so, it won’t.)

The most likely problem, however, is that Iced Tea is not a supported or fully functional Java implementation, unfortunately.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / null price information for auctions today!

Greetings,
I’m posting from a dying phone in a freezing house, cuddled with my family, so please forgive the brevity.

I’ve been out of power for a few days now, due to the Pacific Northwest storms, so I haven’t been able to keep up with this, or do any JBidwatcher work.

When I get power back, and things get back to normal I’ll try to figure out what’s going on. Please keep posting item numbers for bad listings up. Better still, if you get an item with a null price, find its cached copy named {item#}.html.gz in the auctionsave directory and attach it to a support request (the button on the right side of this page), since that’s the file that JBidwatcher parsed wrong.

Thanks for your enthusiasm and help everybody! I’ll get this cleaned up as soon as things get back to normal around here…

Stay safe, and best of luck with your auctions!

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / null price information for auctions today!

Greetings,
@pixxelpusher – Are you using 2.2pre1 as linked on the first page of this discussion? If so, please drop in some item numbers, as it would help me a lot!

Thanks!

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Ready to give up here.. Unknown error sniping on....

Greetings,
If you have logging enabled in the JBidwatcher configuration, it logs the full HTML it received from ‘Unknown error sniping on…’ errors, and I would very much appreciate it if you would find the actual log file (see: http://help.jbidwatcher.com/kb/general/locating… for how to find the error logs) and email it to me, or attach it to a help request at: http://help.jbidwatcher.com/discussion/new

In general ‘Unknown error…’ means that eBay has changed their post-bid messages, and JBidwatcher isn’t recognizing the newest ones. Seeing the actual HTML as logged in the log files lets me figure out what new and wonderful message eBay is using. :)

@Mike-N Your computer is a good ways off from eBay’s time, nearly a minute, which is always worrying. JBidwatcher tries to adjust for that, but isn’t always successful. Please do upload some log files for me to look through, though, as the eBay HTML will help me figure out exactly what’s happening.

@layla if you’re seeing prices not updating, that’s potentially a different problem, and I’d also like to see log files from a session where that was happening. That’s not always reflected in the log files, but sometimes exceptions are occurring which prevent updates from completing.

Also recognize that prices only update about once an hour on their own; if you’re explicitly updating an item and not seeing the price updating to the latest price, that’s something I’d like to see the log file for.) If you have one log file for a session that had both behaviors, that’s fine, of course, but don’t hesitate to attach more log files. The ticketing system has a 10MB limit, though.

Thanks very much for reporting the problems!

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / null price information for auctions today!

Greetings,
By ‘quit JbW2.2pre1’ do you mean restart JBW2.2pre1?

All those items show up with proper prices for me in 2.2pre1, unfortunately. :(

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / null price information for auctions today!

Greetings,
Please, folks, if you’re having ‘null’ price issues, PLEASE put in the item numbers you’re seeing the problem on!

I can’t fix a problem that I can’t see, and for whatever reason the items I try to monitor don’t have this problem. Give me item numbers, and I’ll make it work.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / null price information for auctions today!

Greetings,
I’ve been poking at this problem today, and I think I’ve resolved a few issues with eBay’s latest changes.

For those curious about why it would be intermittent, when eBay pushes out a change to their thousands of web servers, they do it in stages, something like 10%, 50%, 90%, 100%, so that at each point they have a feel for how the traffic and load is changing with their most recent tweaks. So the first day 1/10 servers will serve a slightly different looking page; generally not enough that people notice, but programs like JBidwatcher definitely notice.

I’ve tossed up a version, fresh from the compiler, for testing.

http://www.jbidwatcher.com/download/JBidwatcher… for Mac

http://www.jbidwatcher.com/download/JBidwatcher… for Windows

http://www.jbidwatcher.com/download/JBidwatcher… for Linux

Give it a try, and let me know if it fixes some/all the problems for you.

There’s a known bug where items don’t always show up where they’re supposed to; it is understood, but not fixed in this version. (It happens when the thumbnail thread finds a thumbnail quicker than the add-auction thread finishes up, so the thumbnail thread ‘redraws’ the listing, but it hasn’t had its category set by the add-auction thread yet, so it ends up in ‘current’.)

Anyhow, give it a try, and let me know if it resolves some of the data issues.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Mac OS X layout problems

Greetings,
Try double-clicking the button/time/username display. It’ll shrink down, and should fit better.

It’s probably the time zone, yeah. I didn’t give enough buffer for 4-character time zones, so Java wraps it, which messes up the display.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Snipe Fired Immediately

Greetings,
That’s definitely strange; had you adjusted the snipe time at all? By default it’s 30 seconds, but some folks test that sniping is working by setting it to 86400 (number of seconds in a day) or another big number in order to cause the snipe to fire immediately, demonstrating that sniping works.

It’s a long shot, but I thought I’d ask. You can check the interface on the Sniping tab of JBidwatcher’s Configuration Manager, or look for snipemilliseconds in JBidWatch.cfg to see what it’s set to. (If that last is empty, it’s set to 30 seconds, which is the default.)

Outside of that, all I can think of is that it must have parsed the item end date wrong, since everything depends on the auction’s end date being recognized correctly. Still, that’d mess up so many other things that it doesn’t seem right either.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: Announcements / [PreRelease] JBidwatcher 2.1.6pre6

Greetings,
@FredThompson – Try changing the highlight color yourself and see if that helps.

@zappram – Glad to know it’s working well for you!

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / "Time left" problem

Greetings,
Have you tried 2.1.6pre6 at all?

If you load that, and refresh the listing, it may pick up the end date correctly.

Best of luck!

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: General Sniping Discussion / Can`t snipe on FP maked auctions

Greetings,
Try my current pre-release at: http://forum.jbidwatcher.com/forums/9/topics/2894

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: Announcements / [PreRelease] JBidwatcher 2.1.6pre6

Greetings,
This pre-release version is being put out there mainly to fix the ‘n/a’ time issues and eBay’s new ‘/itm/’ format URLs. The full list of changes is at the bottom of this message.

This is a pre-release, so I really need feedback on how it’s doing, if anything new breaks, etc…

You can download it here:

Mac OS X: http://www.jbidwatcher.com/download/JBidwatcher…

Windows (non-installer): http://www.jbidwatcher.com/download/JBidwatcher…

Linux (jar file): http://www.jbidwatcher.com/download/JBidwatcher…

Please let me know if you run into any problems with this version; I’m really hoping to get it released soon, but I need it vetted by you folks first!

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Changelog:

User Visible

• Remove Mature Audiences from the eBay configuration display. It’s my #1 support problem for user having trouble logging in. It’s still accessible from the Advanced Configuration setting, as ‘ebay.mature’ (without the quotes), and it’s described in the FAQ.
• Fix a longstanding bug that you couldn’t really change username/password while running JBidwatcher; you had to shut it down and restart JBidwatcher. Now it takes effect immediately!
• Fix another longstanding bug where on a bid, JBidwatcher would forget who the seller was, replacing them with the high bidder’s id, and thus items would fall out of the selling tab.
• Some price detection improvements.
• Don’t stomp on user-entered or previously-correctly detected shipping amounts.
• Dragging an image from your browser onto an auction sets that auction’s thumbnail to that image.
• When adding an auction that is already in your auction list, it now switches to the category it’s in, selects the auction referenced, and scrolls to it.
• Show the actual version/build information on Windows and Linux.
• Better end date detection (fixes the ‘n/a’ problem)
• Recognize eBay’s new ‘/itm/’ URL format
• Recognize seller-ended auctiosn.

Internals

• Hopefully improve sleep-detection and handling.
• Failing to load the tray.dll (as on Windows 7 64 bit) shouldn’t cause the program to fail to start up.
• Lots of changes for debugging and testing.
• Improved scripting interface.
• Small improvements to thread safety.
• Lots of refactorings and cleanups.

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Snipe amount column

Greetings,
You should also be able to right-click on the tab name, and select ‘Custom Columns’ and choose whichever columns you want to see.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / search stopped working - why?

Greetings,
eBay changed the format of item URLs; I’m working on fixing it, and I have a pre-release available from https://jbidwatcher.lighthouseapp.com/projects/… (That ticket is a different one, but I’m trying to solve a few problems at once with the next release.)

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / URL adding doesnt work

Greetings,
eBay changed the format of item URLs; I’m working on fixing it, and I have a pre-release available from https://jbidwatcher.lighthouseapp.com/projects/… (That ticket is a different one, but I’m trying to solve a few problems at once with the next release.)

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / 2.1.5 not "searching" in Lion

Greetings,
eBay changed the format of item URLs; I’m working on fixing it, and I have a pre-release available from https://jbidwatcher.lighthouseapp.com/projects/… (That ticket is a different one, but I’m trying to solve a few problems at once with the next release.)

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Development / Joining in to support Tradera.com

Greetings,
Right, and section 2.2b of the Terms of Use says that you can’t scrape for the functionality that isn’t available in their API, meaning you have to either scrape 100% and not use the API, or use the API and not snipe.

Hobson’s choice, essentially.

This is the same reason that JBidwatcher doesn’t use the eBay API.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Development / Joining in to support Tradera.com

Greetings,
So…I have way too much on my plate to be able to support it directly. There’s some interesting things you can learn from their site, though. For instance, a lot of the URL is ‘noise’, i.e. unnecessary.

and

are the same thing. The URL format (for auctions) appears to be {dash-separated-title}-auktion-{category id}-{auction id}.

However, when displaying the page it doesn’t use any of it except the auction id.

Normalizing URLs is one important key to determining how to parse the pages, so in the future you can just use the unique id of the page to load the item.

Beyond that, there’s a ton of stuff around what messages show up when you bid on an item and are in the lead, are below the existing hidden bid, tie the existing hidden bid, bid after it’s over, bid against yourself, underbid your existing bid, underbid the current bid, bid less than a bid increment.

You also have to get a feeling for the HTML layout of the page; what fields precede each of the data values you’re trying to extract, generally: current price, buy-it-now price (if applicable), high bidder, shipping, insurance, # of bids, title, end date & time, seller info, location, thumbnail…

It’s a lot less about Java programming than the grungy work of figuring out how the site behaves, what it shows, and how to identify it’s gotten into various states.

I hope this brain-dump helps!

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / OSX Lion 10.7 compability?

Greetings,
I’m running Lion on my laptop, and JBidwatcher seems to run just fine.

The first run required a download of the Java Runtime, but that appeared automatic, which was a nice touch.

After that installed, it launched flawlessly… Give it a try, and let me know if it works as well for you!

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Why is JB getting a cookie from UK?

Greetings,
Because JBidwatcher has no way of knowing for sure that you are going to only view US-based items, and so it keeps a UK session around just in case.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / Was my bit placed

Greetings,
Your bid was refused by eBay; JBidwatcher has nothing to do with it. If the seller has set a location restriction (one of the more common ones), eBay refuses the bid without any recourse. Even if you’ve made an agreement with the seller, if they don’t edit their listing to turn off the location restriction, eBay will still absolutely refuse your bid.

Sorry, but JBidwatcher has to play by the same rules as everybody else on eBay.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / my bid was the highest and still lost the auction

Greetings,
Reading that log, it strongly suggests you’ve set your snipe time to 1 second. Don’t do that. Don’t set your snipe time closer than 5 seconds, and I strongly recommend around 10 on the fastest connections.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / am i logged in or not?

Greetings,
Awright, that’s it… Starting with the next version, I’ve removed the Mature Audiences check-box from the configuration display. sigh It’s been my #1 support problem for people having trouble logging in.

The flow when you’re logging in as a user who wants access to Mature Audiences items is about 4 pages longer than the normal login flow. That’s 4 more pages that crap can go wrong, and the flow can fail, and drop you out without all the cookies you might need. It’s also a hard-fail for non-US based users; if your account is based on a non-ebay.com site, like ebay.co.uk or ebay.de, then the Mature Audiences checkbox is a ’don’t ever log me in successfully’ button. :(

Folks can still set the ‘ebay.mature’ key to the value of ‘true’ (both without quotes) in the Advanced Configuration page of the Configuration Manager, and it’ll go through the mature audiences flow, but I’m done making it easy to fail to login. :-)

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!