Any progress towards another pre-release with some bugs fixed?

The bugs I’d most like to see fixed:
Randomly declaring auctions as ended for no apparent reason and never sniping
Failing to retry anything, ever. Even when it says it will retry.
Not attempting to snipe if the pre-snipe login failed, even though the last login is most likely still valid
Not disabling time sync even when you use the checkbox to disable time sync

Thanks again,
—Bushytails

Yep – seconded here. I’ve just lost yet another auction due to bidwatcher bugs. I have used it for years, and I don’t think it has ever been free of quite obvious bugs. If I could find a suitable alternative, I’d drop it like a shot.

Morgan – I think what is required is to simplify the code base drastically – all I want it to do is read the items in My eBay, and let me snipe them – nothing else. Why dont you ask the users what features they use? I bet 60 percent of the code base is never used. If you stripped out the cruft, just think how much easier your life would be maintaining the software. Or just give up? Say the software will no longer be maintained? At least the users would know where they were.

Cheers

Tim

Greetings,
It’s tempting. No, look…I still maintain it. I can tell you, statistically, that most people still succeed with their snipes, when their snipe is above the current price. I can tell you that because some folks have opted in to sharing that information with me, and I have a dashboard that tracks that stuff.

It’s a truism that most users only use 20-30% of a program. And while there’s some overlap, the thing each individual user doesn’t realize is that it’s not the same 20-30% for each user.

I’ve HAVE done a from-scratch reimplementation of JBidwatcher as a native app in a more (IMO) efficient language; I’m running it right now. It’s Mac-only, mind you, but it works. It loads the items, monitors them, allows drag-and-drop of items, logging in, has multiple folders, and other basic features.

It doesn’t snipe yet because that’s VASTLY complicated, but it’s my next step.

It doesn’t load ‘My eBay’, because that’s VASTLY complicated. I may never implement that, because it’s been a source of constant bugs since the first time I implemented it, and I loathe the feature because of that. eBay makes changes to the viewItem page VERY rarely. They change ‘My eBay’ constantly.

I have eliminated features in the core JBidwatcher, by the way.

• The newest JBidwatcher version doesn’t have a built-in server to serve expired listings
• doesn’t have internal RSS feeds
• doesn’t output or read XML files
• can’t give you an HTML-formatted view of the listings you’re watching
• doesn’t support mature audiences items (another constant support nightmare)
• doesn’t automatically fallback between international/non-international items (you have to pick one)
• doesn’t even support multisniping, which was a signature feature and unheard of when I added it. :(

I stripped a lot out of JBidwatcher, in the 2.99pre* series. But you know what has the most logic? The UI and the eBay parsing and control code. That stuff I need to have, no matter what other features I have in it. UI is 12,723 Lines Of Code by raw linecount (because I’m lazy right now), eBay handling (9,228 LOC). The rest is mostly support, database, configuration, and utility classes.

I don’t have a good answer for you. I’m the only person working on this, and I have been for 16 years. Sometimes my life takes priority, but I’ve always gotten back to it, and I’ve always responded when there’s an endemic problem. I feel lucky, because there hasn’t been one for a while…I’m probably due. :(

— Morgan

Thanks, Morgan, for the 16 years! Just wanted to say that.

Yes, thanks!

I noticed the lack of adult items and multisniping, though! people use those features. :)

—Bushytails

If it’s working can we have a pre-release of the Mac App Morgan?
The current versions hardly work at all for me on Mac unless I sit and watch it, continually failing to snipe, quoting unknown errors or communication problems although my machine is set not to sleep, it also shows prices in $ when they should be £ even though it is logged in to eBay UK.

I have been using JBW for a while now and contributed twice, and I must say – Thank you very much…. as it had won me many “surprises” and I am happy.

Currently, I am on JBidwatcher (2.99pre5-2-g7251940) using a core i7 Mac and running 10.11.6 and there’s no problem with loading speed, etc. etc….. and it does snipe well for me (if it’s not falling to deep sleep, and snipe bid amount is high enough), but it is loading up listing from “no where”, and they keep adding up, and I’d noticed that some are from very old searches I did, and some of them are from recent search …..

i used to select them all by weeding them out and trash them, but a lot of them came back, and I don’t know if they are duplicated. Then I try to move them to a new Tab, and they keep growing, so eventually I will delete a few hundred of them and quit JBW and launch again….

Besides that…. it’s doing well, and snipe and drag and drop works…….

Again, thanks so much for all the works in the past ….. 16 years is a LONG time…..