I don’t really understand why multi-snipe has been suspended. Many multi-snipes have a significant period between auctions and it seems silly to disallow its use in these circumstances because it may not work correctly when some auctions in the multi-snipe finish too close together.

If you are concerned about people ‘getting it wrong’ (and one job of a software developer is to protect the user from himself!!) you could check the proximity of each auction close when a multisnipe is created\modified and disallow any auction that closes too close to another auction (highlight both auctions and provide msg)

You could define ‘too close’ as the same as the regular auction update cycle or have it as a configuration parameter (with a suitable minimum value.)

Just my 10c!

Greetings,
Multisniping is not disabled because of a problem with timing between listings. Multisniping is disabled because due to some changes on eBay’s site, it’s damn hard to get the current high bidder. It can’t be done at the same time as getting the listing information itself, it has to be a separate page which has to be parsed in a way which is actually somewhat more complex than the main page.

Anyhow, multisniping is disabled because I can’t currently get the high bidder. Without knowing if you are the high bidder on a closed item, I can’t disable later snipes when you’ve ‘officially’ won an item.

There are other mechanisms, but they are somewhat difficult and subject to frequent eBay changing. (They change the ’You’re the high bidder!‘/’You’ve won this auction!’/etc. text waaaay too often.)

I hope that helps!

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

Two potential work-arounds come to mind… One would be to instead look for evidence that you are not the current high bidder. For example, if the first and last letter of the current high bidder’s user name and their reputation score does not match yours, or if the current bid amount is higher than the snipe amount, then you probably didn’t win.

The second, likely more reliable, idea would be to instead look in the my ebay page and see if the auction shows up in the list of recent purchases. This might fall down for people who purchase many pages of items regularly, but appropriate warnings when creating multisnipes coupled with the ability to disable all of them if the list gets too long to parse would likely do the trick…

I too wish multisniping was available.

Even if it doesn’t happen again… this is till hands down the best method to grabbing auctions there is out there.

Thanks Morgan for all your excellent work!

: )

Gixen is able to do this. I really miss the jBidWatcher GUI for it though.

Can’t we just code jBidWatcher to do some test checks or the fist bid attempt in a multi, and if it can’t determine the winner it will just cancel all other bids in the multi?