In Ebay you can not see other bidder’s full names. The names are abbreviated like so"n***r".

Do these abbreviated names stay the same, or do they change over time?
Do all people see the same abbreviated name for a certain person?

For JBidwatcher-Companion I’m thinking about a graph to analyze the behavior of individual bidders. Maybe a histogram of the prices that they pay for a product. Or the difference between the price that they pay to the median price for this product.

I believe they stay the same for the duration of the particular auction only.

If I’m correct one bidders name will be rendered differently for every auction he bids on but once rendered for one auction it will be the same for that auction and for all who view it.

eBay made this change to stop bidders from being targeted with false second chance offers but the side-effect has been to invalidate any analysis of your competing bidders so I think that you won’t get any such function to work.

Yours
Ivan

PS. A simple way to test this is to place a bid yourself on two different auctions (test category if you wish) and then use a computer that’s NOT logged in to eBay to view the same auctions.

I think the abbreviated bidder names stay constant over time. To prove it let’s make a little experiment:

Here are the bidders of some auctions in which I participated. (Starting from the top.) My abbreviation is “e***1”. I compiled the lists while I was logged out of Ebay.

Please report if you see the same abbreviated names! Especially look for “e***1”.

http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=190498140853
ID : 190498140853
Bidders : i***s, i***s, e***1, i***s, s***5, t***p, l***e, r***1, l***e, – * -

http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=180629172680
ID : 180629172680
Bidders : l***l, 2***e, l***l, l***l, e***7, l***l, a***n, e***1, e***1

http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=280617744117
ID : 280617744117
Bidders : e***1, i***m, i***m, r***., 0***0, r***., r***., 0***0, f***l, e***d, 1***1, f***l, 1***1, 8***n

Eike.

Looks like you may be right.

Yours
Ivan

PS. Btw I have an F90X with battery grip for sale if you’re interested :-)

Great, thank you for reporting.

For the flashes, I use them with a digital camera, but off camera. This is explained, and popularized in the Strobist blog:
http://strobist.blogspot.com/