First of all, thanks for this great app :)

Have a similar problem like eu above:
Sniping is configured to 6 seconds, but actual snipe fired exactly 1 minute and 6 seconds before auction end, as you can see in the log and the auction itself:

Thu Sep 24 19:42:44 CEST 2009: Time delta with ebay is 682
…
Thu Sep 24 20:02:31 CEST 2009: 120470829480 (Ipod nano 8 GB – defekt) – Successfully sniped a high bid on Ipod nano 8 GB – defekt!

ebay.de
OS: MS Windows 7
JRE: SUN 1.5.0_19

Hi guys! I’ve just joined say as to get some feedback about the efficacy of this tool. I had initially installed the 2.0.1 version, not having read all of the details about the errors that may have been occurring with it. I think I may have lost a bid yesterday because of that. I was heartbroken!

But now I’ve installed the latest version, and am wanting to know how predictable it is. This is essential for me now, since I’m about to bid on something rare that I’m not likely to find again anytime soon. So I want to make certain this program is working as I expect it to. What I have learned as a preventative measure, is the place the highest bid/snipe that I want initially, so that there are no possible/further errors with increasing the amount of the snipe causing a bid to be placed and revealing my intentions.

So what I want to know now, for the sake of future bids/snipes, is whether this latest version is reliable enough to trust?

And now for a suggestion (a word from your sponsor, so to speak). I suggest that you allow users of this program to make payments directly to you with PayPal through the program itself. It would always be an option and in no way required. But I for one would be willing to provide subsidy for you, provided that this program works. For one thing, the more reliable the program becomes, the more people will use it, and the more they will agree to paying you for your work. It would be a powerful incentive for you (to even work full-time at this) to ensure that your clients are always satisfied. I don’t think it’s a lot to ask of anyone. Since if you’re helping them either save money or acquire things they would not have otherwise been able to, we should have good reason to compensate you for your work. And I say this as someone who has developed software myself.

I only recently got a PayPal account so that I will now be able to receive donations myself. And I have to credit you for the idea that I’ve actually propose here. I really balked before at giving donations in the past. But since my money is involved here, I’m actually willing to pay you for my success. I really think other developers should offer this as well. Then a user can setup a compensation schedule according to the preferences. It’s just an idea. But I really think you should consider it.

Best regards,
Xavian-Anderson Macpherson
ShingoshiDao

EDIT: Take note. I’ve just placed a test bid on another item to see how this works. The shipping for the new item is through USPS for a rate of $10.70. The price of the shipping is not showing up. Is that to be expected with shipments from the Postal Service?

In case anyone’s wondering; this release does not seem stable at all.

I had configured the snipe to shoot 5 seconds before the end.
It snipped ~40 minutes before the end.

Not very fun.. hope it gets corrected :)

Greetings,
@raz – I’ve seen a lot of problems, but the app has been mostly stable for most users. That problem is not one I’ve seen before. Do you perhaps have a log file you could post on the bug tracking site for me?

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

I can attest that my setup is working as intended. Sniping at the time configured. I think one possible solution may be to stop the current snipe and then change the amount you want to raise or lower it to. That way, there’s no chance of posting the current snipe as a result of modifying it.

Morgan,
I didn’t see until after I installed the latest version and started getting more into what was there, that I noticed that you already have the contributions worked out. But what I want to know is if you can give us an option to set a percentage of our winning bids in payment to you for the program? I for one like it, and would like to see you continue to work on it.

Now, if I can only manage how addicting all of this is!

Best regards,
Xavian-Anderson Macpherson
ShingoshiDao

I’ve got a weired problem that keeps happening with the same seller. whan I add gigacity items( such as the windows mce remote, 220489685741 or 220491325445) they show up as (FPx2) with the price, but there is only one item for sale and it’s a standard auction any idea’s?

>>>> So what I want to know now, for the sake of future bids/snipes, is whether this latest version is reliable enough to trust?

Xavian – I’m on a Mac using OS X and for me jbidwatcher has been as reliable as one can possibly expect.
I haven’t really seen any of the problems people mention here when it comes to the actual bid.

But having said that, I have still lost a number of bids even though my snipe was higher than the winning bid.
The last one I lost because I didn’t meet some requirements the seller specified – the one previous to that I lost because my DSL connection was down.
Obviously, I would have lost these even if I did a manual snipe without jbidwatcher – nothing to do with jbidwatcher as such.

I just wanted to point this out because if there is really a very important auction to you with a “once in a lifetime opportunity”, I wouldn’t try to snipe with jbidwatcher or manual or any other way. There are just too many things that can go wrong over which jbidwatcher has no control.
I have even see eBay being unaccessible for a few seconds or minutes – if those are the “wrong” minutes you would miss out again.

krs99,
Are you sure that you don’t have the “subtract shipping amount” set in your main configuration? If so, unset it. Then only use it on a per-bid/snipe basis. Otherwise, you will wind up with lower snipes than you intended. But if you’ve been using this for a long time, I’m guessing you’ve already figured this out and have it set properly. So I’m not sure what’s happening. And I must apologize for doing precisely what always annoys me about others who post they’re not having problems with something. Not everyone has the same operating system, and results will therefore always be different. Even though this is a java application, I’m sure there are even differences between the versions running on each operating system. I only mention this, because I should have taken that into consideration when commenting.

Frankly, I hope I don’t have a problem today. Because I’m bidding on something I’d really rather have than lose! I’ve only used this a few times so far. Each time I’ve been happy with it’s timing. I just hope today isn’t the day I find myself wishing it had worked as it did in the past.

To all, have a good weekend!
Xavian-Anderson Macpherson
ShingoshiDao

Would someone please explain how the multisnipe works? It seems to allow you to bid one amount on all items. But does the amount roll over from the first to the other following? It seems as it’s setup now, that if you have ten items, you’re committed to the multiple of the fixed amount for all ten items.

What I would like to see is the ability to role over the remainder from the first bid to all following bids consecutively. That way you can commit an amount to the highest ordered bid and have it decreased as the bidding process continues. Granted, you would have to order your items from most expensive to least expensive. But that’s really not all that difficult to do on the selection of items in the queue.

Xavian-Anderson Macpherson
ShingoshiDao

Xavian: what you ask for is a very exotic use case, I think most users will agree with me. It would only make sense if you absolutely want a number of items and have a certain budget. But that’s just the beginning of the story. I’d say things get very complex if you follow that line: How about you absolutely want the second item (second in order of auction ending time) but the first item already sucks up all your budget? Not really cool, right? While it’s not impossible to implement complex auction/budget structures like that it’s most probably not something a whole lot of people would actually use.

Multisnipe as it’s implemented serves another purpose: It allows you to bid on multiple auctions for a similar or identical item trying to get one of them. As soon as one snipe was successful all following (again, in order of ending time) snipes are cancelled automatically.

Greetings,
I agree with Dominik; it’s an edge case. That said, I made a version of JBidwatcher which included scripting support (JRuby, specifically) which would allow you to do things like that. Essentially you would write a bidding algorithm, and apply it to a set of listings.

Sadly, scripting support was more or less vetoed by the vocal JBidwatcher users at the time. (It adds another 10MB to the application, and around 4-5 seconds of startup time; this was at the same time as I’d added 4MB for the on-disk database library and such.) Because of this, I never really fully fleshed it out. Currently it only supports creating custom columns really well, the triggers aren’t entirely in place for everything else.

It still works in the current build, and I’d love to release it as an add-on download at some point in the future.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

I think I just experienced a problem someone else had. I made the mistake of having JBidwatch subtract the price of shipping when it was free. It seems my bid was never even placed, or it made the mistake of dealing with a shipping cost that didn’t exist. I’ve learned my lesson here. But I don’t think that’s happened before. But I won’t allow it again. I lost a fantastic tripod because of this.

My bid was $210, and the item sold for $208. So something was definitely wrong.

Xavian-Anderson Macpherson
ShingoshiDao

Greetings,
@Xavian – Between $100 and $250, the minimum bid increment is $2.50. If the item was at $208, and your bid was $210, eBay would have rejected the bid as too low, and it wouldn’t show up in the bid history.

— Morgan Schweers, Cyber**FOX**!

Hey! Thanks. It all worked out. I found a new Manfrotto 190CX4 carbon-fiber tripod for less. But is there anyway JBidwatcher could calculate the required bid to eliminate this problem for the user? I tried to calculate it, but obviously got it wrong. I thought there might have been something wrong with the amount of my bid. Now I know for certain.

And here’s a question on a previous topic. Could you create something like extensions for JBidwatcher to allow for the additions of features not in the standard set? That way if no one had the extensions installed, they wouldn’t see a decrease in performance or an increase in installation size as you mentioned.

Xavian-Anderson Macpherson
ShingoshiDao

Sniping has been working fairly well for me with this version – but one thing that’s driving me crazy is that all my completed listings are always pulled into the My Ebay tab (originally), and now that I’ve changed those to arrive in the Current tab (via Search Manager), there too.

Is this a known issue? If I delete them manually then they just all come back when the next get-items event happens. This never happened with previous versions (and I’ve been using jBid for a long time, it rules! :).

… ah, I needed to completely clear out all my settings (delete the \.jbidwatcher folder). Now it’s back to normal with no ‘My Ebay’ tab – although I never set up this tab, it just appeared after the upgrade to 2.1 pre4.

.. no, it’s gone wrong again! Suddenly I have a ‘My Ebay’ tab again, and now new active listings no longer show up in Current, but in My Ebay (with all the completed listings)… ? This all worked fine yesterday, anyone know what’s going on?

sometimes, when i’m trying to delete auctions, this problem appears:
Wed Nov 11 11:11:20 CET 2009: PMQ Caught exception: java.lang.IndexOutOfBoundsException: Index: 37, Size: 37
Index: 37, Size: 37
at java.util.ArrayList.RangeCheck(Unknown Source)
at java.util.ArrayList.get(Unknown Source)
at java.util.Collections$SynchronizedList.get(Unknown Source)
at com.jbidwatcher.ui.table.Transformation.getValueAt(Transformation.java:37)
at com.jbidwatcher.ui.table.TableSorter.getValueAt(TableSorter.java:124)
at com.jbidwatcher.ui.JTabManager.getIndexedEntry(JTabManager.java:164)
at com.jbidwatcher.ui.UserActions.silentDelete(UserActions.java:306)
at com.jbidwatcher.ui.UserActions.DoDelete(UserActions.java:211)
at com.jbidwatcher.ui.UserActions.DoAction(UserActions.java:1383)
at com.jbidwatcher.ui.UserActions.DoAction(UserActions.java:1354)
at com.jbidwatcher.ui.UserActions.messageAction(UserActions.java:75)
at com.jbidwatcher.util.queue.PlainMessageQueue.run(PlainMessageQueue.java:55)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

after that it’s not possible to delete any more auctions. I’d be delighted to point to the exact cause of the problem, but unfortunately the jbidwatcher “source” download only seems to be a bad joke …

I just had a similar issue to previous posters about snipes firing early. my case wasn’t egregious. in that it’s configured for 5s, and it sniped about 15s early (i.e. at 20s).

my only guess is that perhaps I set the snipe when snipe time was configured to 20s, then changes the snipe time to 5s in the configuration dialog. If that makes sense as intended behavior for snipes, then I guess you can ignore this message. With that said, I’m not sure that this is the order that things happened in, but I do remember changing the snipe time around the same time as I set the snipe (and 20s would be reasonable guess of what it was b4)

FYI was using 2.0.1 & it occasionally exhibited the ‘wrong currency’ error. Now updated to the latest beta & the listing already programmed has now the currency has displayed correctly, so we’ll keep an eye on it

I just installed 2.1pre4, but I get an error stating that I need version 1.5.0 of the Java runtime installed when I already have the latest version of the Java runtime installed. I’m running Windows 7 64-bit. Thanks for any help.

Oops too soon. Just added 2 snipes – one went in as £ correctly, the other at $
Go figure

Interesting – the ‘$’ listing doesn’t track current bids, just stays at $1

Could you please provide the description to wrap the number of lines equal in height to the thumbnail when displayed. Some descriptions are rather long and should be wrapped to display entirely.

It would also be nice if the seller’s name and location were to appear in the same box as the description (with a blank link separating them). This would save space by having only one field for both.

Xavian-Anderson Macpherson
ShingoshiDao

Greetings,
@Xavian – I probably could; essentially it would be a ‘JBidwatcher Power Pack’ which you download, and it adds scripting features, and cool stuff like that. It’d be a bit weird to install, though… I’ll think about that, as it’s a pretty good idea. My ultimate goal is to get YOU folks, the users, sharing cool recipes for sniping functions and customized columns, and maybe even integrating with other web services and stuff like that. (Someone could build a twitter plugin that tweets what you’ve won with JBidwatcher! :) )

@gl – The ‘My eBay’ tab is automatically created by the ‘Get My eBay Items’ search task. You SHOULD be able to change the tab that search task drops items into, by opening up Search Manager and editing the ‘My eBay’ task. If that’s not sticking (i.e. the search changes don’t get saved), that’s a bug.

@lsd – Yes, that’s a weird one and I think I understand why it’s happening. I’ve got a fix into the source tree, but I’m not 100% certain it fixes it in all cases. The source code for JBidwatcher is available on github if you want to look it over, or build it yourself.

@spotter – It’s possible JBidwatcher got a bad net latency reading, and added a few seconds to be safe. It takes readings of how long requests take, and uses those to adjust its clock.

@stevebower – I think I have the currency issue fixed…again. :( I need to do a new pre-release soon.

@DaveF – I don’t have Windows 7, 64 or 32 bit, unfortunately. (In fact, even my Vista box is gathering dust in a corner.) I’ve heard a lot of folks indicate that the best answer is to install the 32 bit Sun Java runtime on Windows 7, even if you’re normally running in 64 bit mode.

@Xavian – Line wrapping is a royal pain. :( I can see your point, for thumbnail mode, that it’s a lot better to wrap the description text since you have some vertical space. The problem comes in when you shrink the description box to where it tries to wrap to three lines. It has to prevent that, because it starts looking REALLY bad at that point. :(

Seller name and location in one field? Do you mean ‘with a blank line separating them’? If so, that’s really a custom columns thing. It’d only be useful in the thumbnail mode, and probably even then other folks would like to see things like feedback, or such.

— Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!