Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Lots of "JBidWatcher Saved Auctions" files ...

AFAIK, you can safely delete older auctions-.xml and error.log files.
An cron-job might work nice for you.

Topic: JBidwatcher Development / Feature Request: Different Views

Yes, an thumb column (instead of mouseover) would be really good. Maybe a larger pic appearing when mouse over the thumb.

Topic: eBay Chat / HIGH LEVEL EBAY EMPLOYEE CONFIRMS JBWatcher BLOCKED!!!!

Well, there at least seem to be some parallels between ebay and HLS ;-)

For me it’s clear that protest @ ebay have helped a bit, so we shouldn’t
stop to do that.

cu

Topic: JBidwatcher Development / RFC: Interface for search agents

Hi,

“box name” refers to different directories (aka “boxes”) an search result record may ly in.
One of auctionwatch’s key features is the ability to automatically sort results. In fact it currently
has to dimensions, a) the “box” (where new results per default goes to “incoming”, but the
user may speficy another one; the “watch” button moves to the “WATCH” box, blacklisted
ones to “BLACKLIST”, those reached the price limit to “MAXPRICE”) and the feed name
(which is just an user-given name/tag – many feeds/searches may share the same name).
Both, box name and feed-tag have a special value ”*” which (obviously) is no filtering at all.

So I intend to map them into an directory hierachy. Maybe the time scope filtering to
(“ends today”, “ends later”, “ended”) will make up another level. I’m not quite sure about that.

The idea of putting evrything to GET is to make it some bit easier for scripting and maybe
safe a few bits of traffic.

If I understood REST right, it’s an kind of filesystem subset. Modeling evrything into an
(synthetic) filesystem has it’s charme – makings many things easier, the AW appserver
could be actually an 9P server and all frontends (including the web-frontend) just access
it via 9P filesystem :)

cu

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / 300MB memory usage

56M for such a small applications is a little big fat.
I’ll have a try w/ different jvm’s in a few days … let’s see it’s just sun-jdk that’s so hungry.
And maybe I’ll have a try w/ gcj.

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / 300MB memory usage

Hi folks,

I just had a look at my box:

Virtual image size: 251M
Resident size: 56M
JVM: sun-jdk-1.5
OS: gentoo-x86

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / "my items" scan -> "my watched items" ?

BTW: I’ve now managed to switch back to the old (non-beta) “my ebay”.
Does this have any influence ?

Topic: JBidwatcher Development / RFC: Interface for search agents

Hi folks,

I already wrote some lines about my search agent (http:///auctionwatch.metux.de) and my plan for
JBW integration.

Now I’d like to talk about an open and efficient
robot interface for that. Some first ideas:

• Evrything starts with some URL prefix
  (eg. http://auctionwatch.metux.de/ROBOT/)
• http reply compression SHOULD be supported
• Authentication key is passed via the next “subdir”.
  Structure and semantics are specific to the agent;
  clients just see it as an varbatim text, which just
  has to fit in an (url-encoded) single directory name.
  (eg. an md5). An special “ANONYMOUS” is reserved
  for anonymous (non-logged-in) operations.
• The next directory level specifies operations
• Listing just the item-IDs (no further data) is
  done via “list-ids op. It expects the box name as
  next directory level. The result is formatted as a list
  of <platform><item-id>+<newline>
• more commands can be defined later :)

cu

Topic: eBay Chat / Social attack on "ebay beta"

Hi folks,

I’d like to ask you to post some (maybe harsh ;-P) trouble
reports on ebay’s beta webinterface. It’s really a mess.

BTW: I’ve just found out it’s possible to switch back to
the old one. There was a strangely named link somewhere
on the top of “my ebay”. (ugh, already forgot the name).

cu

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / "my items" scan -> "my watched items" ?

Hi folks,

does JBW’s “my items” search also read the “my watched items” list
from ebay ?

I’ve got the strange feeling that it only reads in the items I’m
already bidding on, but not those I’m just watching.

cu

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / An attempt to a better browser integration

How can I install this script to my browser (seamonkey) ?

cu

Topic: eBay Chat / HIGH LEVEL EBAY EMPLOYEE CONFIRMS JBWatcher BLOCKED!!!!

Hah, maybe the trouble reporting in the forums had helped some bit :)

So, everytime when eBay does any attack on JBW, we should should make a big fuss in the ebay forums ;-P
(what I already called “social attack” a few weeks ago)

Topic: eBay Chat / OT: AuctionWatch

Hi folks,

it’s right, the site tends to be a bit slow :(
The point is, it’s running on my home box, which is only connected via an German Telekom DSL
(so a bit latency and not very wide uplink), and it’s sometimes busy w/ remote backups.
From my girlfriend’s flat (where I’m sitting most the time), it works quite reasonable, but it might
be slower from another DSL link.

Well, for now it’s an just4fun project w/o budget.
Maybe, if it someday reaches some user base which brings some advert income or another maybe
donations, I’ll move it to an datacenter.

I’ve already did some efforts in reducing traffic, eg. by doing the table rendering via jscript,
but this doesn’t really solve the problem.

As already said, I’m planning an integration into JBW, so the JBW lust loads some compressed
“flat” text files from the webserver and does a few small http calls for actions (w/o xml bloat!).
Any help is appreciated :)

cu

Topic: eBay Chat / OT: AuctionWatch

Hi folks,

maybe some of you might be interested in one of my projects:

http://auctionwatch.metux.de/

It’s an auction search tool, which allows scanning for unlimited amount
of searches and filtering my blacklist and maxprices.

Currently supports just ebay, but others are also planned.

cu

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Not Logging In..

Well, we could try to make it fire for dozens of “innocent” accounts. Maybe it’s enough to produce several login fails.

I’ve got a bunch of old ebay accounts we could use for testing.

Topic: General Sniping Discussion / Suggested fix for Turing

For me: both inacceptible.
I can live with jbw showing the hieroglyphs and asking for user input.

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Not logged in ebay's increased security monitoring has been triggered, Jbidwatcher can not log in for a while

Well known ebay problem: they’re sabotaging their own users.
You have to decipher some hieroglyhs on login (called CAPTCHA – an quite misleading name).

For now we have no way for handling them by JBW. It simply stops loggin in (you’ll see an exception on the logging console).

Here are some ideas (technical and social how to fix this):

• http://forum.jbidwatcher.com/forums/4/topics/1175
• http://forum.jbidwatcher.com/forums/4/topics/1175

cu

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / eBay Security Monitoring Prevents Sniping

Hi,

for fighting against eBay’s captcha sabotage please see:

• http://forum.jbidwatcher.com/forums/7/topics/1174
  Technical solution (eg. asking user to decipher the hieroglyhps)

• http://forum.jbidwatcher.com/forums/4/topics/1175
  Social solution: bombing ebay support and forums

Topic: eBay Chat / Social attack on eBay's captcha sabotage

Hi folks,

some idea for fighting against ebay’s captcha sabotage:

• regularily open trouble tickets and telling the support that they’re sabotaging their own customers.
• massive traffic in the public ebay forums and stating that we don’t want to trade there anylonger, if that problem remains

I’ve started this a few days ago, and now my accounts seems to work again. (let’s see how long it ramains).

cu

Topic: JBidwatcher Development / eBay captcha handling

Hi folks,

as captcha problems seem to go worse, here’re some thoughts how to handle this:

• if an captcha is requested, the login process is hold
• the user gets an window with the captcha image is asked to enter the value.
• maybe we later can add an OCR for additional guessing.

• introduce an captcha callback interface, implemented by the GUI
• in the login state machine we add an new state “waiting for captcha”
• an new method is called with the captcha value and proceeds captcha-hold logins.

cu

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Not Logging In..

Hi folks,

I’m experiencing the same problem. Obviously ebay now requires hieroglyph deciphering on every single login.

We really need a way to fix this, otherwise JBW is completely useless.

cu

Topic: Announcements / eBay is sabotaging us.

Hi folks,

maybe some of you already noticed: ebay now requires reading hieroglyphs on every login,
so jbw cannot work.

I think it’s time to strike back. Maybe with an massive press and trouble reporting
campaings. I’ve already started lots of trouble reporing in the ebay forums as well
as in other ebay-related forums.

cu

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / headless JBW ?

Hi folks,

is it possible to run jbw without GUI and maybe later connect another jbw remotely ?

cu

Topic: JBidwatcher Development / Adding another search type

Hi folks,

I’d like to integrate jbidwatcher w/ my auction search agent in a way that it directly can
import the watched articles from auctionwatch. This way I often do not need to walk through
ebay pages anymore.

Any tips how to get started ?

thx

Topic: JBidwatcher Development / Refactoring jbidwatcher

Hi folks,

I’m currently planning to use parts of jbidwatcher in my auction agent platform
(http://auctionwatch.metux.de/) and first do some refactoring:

a) use my small classlib (metux.util) and move a few common classes there (ie Base64).
b) separate the ebay logic from gui and move it to its own library.

Any comments on that ?

cu