That would be a monumental endeavor.
How about counterfeit listings, it would take a human eye and due diligence to check every listing before the purchase is initiated, but it's a good idea I guess for someone who will spend the time to develop it right.
@FadeToBlack said:
I'm more interested in the use of the data to develop an AI that could scan auctions faster than a human and make accurate buying decisions based on interpretation of the images.
Would be a fun little project for somebody to work on for a few years and this kind of interface would help in that regard.
Based on some of the grading I've seen recently, this may already have been implemented by at least one TPG.
@BruceS said:
That would be a monumental endeavor.
How about counterfeit listings, it would take a human eye and due diligence to check every listing before the purchase is initiated, but it's a good idea I guess for someone who will spend the time to develop it right.
A previous version of the software OCR'd the serial numbers off slabs and verified them at the services. I also experimented with reading the barcodes but to be honest, it was pretty hit or miss. Maybe with today's better-quality images, it'd be easier.
If you had a list of, say, stolen coins, it wouldn't be too hard to have a piece of code keep an eye out for them.
The trick, of course, is to identify the counterfeit coins in bogus holders. I don't see that happening any time soon.
Barcode reading would be the way to go, presently. Because that is what is the most obviously apparent flaw in the counterfeits that we have seen recently. Also the label font could be used as a secondary verification. Nothing will be foolproof, and I wouldn't trust any program to pull the trigger on anything over $50. And as the software improves, so will the ripoff artist.
First, when you create a seller list and add sellers to it, it's stored separately from the search. So, you can associate that blacklist of crooks with as many searches as you want, or no searches at all. The only way to lose the blacklist is to manually delete it on the Seller Lists tab of the Search page.
Second, you can make as many Search Groups as you want! Each one retains its own memory of which time periods you've seen. For example:
Search Group: barber coinage
Advanced Search: barber quarters
Advanced Search: barber dimes
Search Group: some cents
Advanced Search: lincoln cents
Advanced Search: indian cents
Perhaps a bad example because you could simply implement these as single searches of multiple categories, but I hope you get the idea.
If I've scanned through both search groups a day earlier and I select the barber coinage group, it's going to show me all the barber quarters and dimes that have been listed in the last day. If I don't look at the some cents group until tomorrow, it will have two days of results to show me.
Once you've added multiple Search Groups, there are two ways to switch between them. Either click the View Results link in each Search Group's panel on the Search page, or after you're on the Results page, simply click the Results navigation tab again. It will give you a dropdown that shows each of your Search Groups and a badge indicating how many items exist in their caches.
Note that the system only retrieves results for the selected Search Group and only if all searches in the Search Group have been validated, but it will fetch results regardless of where you are in the app.
So I mentioned that each Search Group keeps track of which time periods you've seen. That's what you see in the progress bar below each Search Group on the Search page.
When you add a search to a Search Group, it is used for future progress that you make through the Search Group, but we don't retroactively go back and retrieve results for the time periods we already searched.
If you want to start over and see all the results, both of any existing searches in the Search Group, and any new searches that you added, you hit the yellow Rewind button on the Search Group panel. This empties the Search Group and causes you to start over with with all the results from all the searches in the Search Group.
I want to explain a little about the motivation for AuctionHero, which might make its utility more clear. This is kinda complicated, which is why I recommend that people just try using it for a couple days.
Let's say that I'm a dealer who specializes in FE cents and I want to see everything in the Flying Eagle Small Cents category, which has ~5,000 listings. I browse eBay most weekday evenings, but on Mondays and Thursdays I do my accounting, which usually means I spend half the night fighting with QuickBooks and the other half crying into my scotch.
eBay is designed to show you lots of listings, as many times as possible. They want you to see everything, and ideally multiple times. They want you to have the impression that everything is "fresh" and that you'll miss something if you don't see everything over and over, every day.
They are actually right, at least about the last part. The problem is that when I sit down to see the new stuff on eBay, I have two ways to try to find listings I haven't seen previously in the last 1-3 days; I can sort by Ending Soonest or Newly Listed.
Ending Soonest: These listings are going to include stuff that I already saw, interleaved with new stuff that happens to be ending soon, so that's basically untenable.
Newly Listed: This material is all new, but a three day listing that started almost three days ago is going to take me awhile to find -- so long that it might actually end before I see it.
AuctionHero solves this problem. For any search, of any size, regardless of how often you view the results, when you view the results, or how much of the result set you've viewed,
it shows you only what you haven't seen and
it shows you the freshest Buy-It-Nows and listings nearest to ending and
it shows you new Buy-It-Nows as you page through the results
If I load up my Flying Eagle search, the first results that it shows me are going to be buyable items just posted, or any item that is just about to end. I need to see these first, because there's a greater chance that someone might buy that wicked Buy-It-Now the longer it remains listed, and obviously, I cannot buy an item that is about to end if I'm focused elsewhere and the listing ends. Similarly, if I'm looking at items Ending Soonest, I'm going to miss an awesome Buy-It-Now just posted.
If I browse through 500 Flying Eagle cents, then maybe the system is showing me listings that are buyable, and were listed (say) 2 days ago, or listings that are ending in (say) 2 days. At this point, I can walk away from the computer and I know that if I come back tomorrow, I'm not going to miss ANY listings that are ending normally. The only stuff I might miss are new Buy-It-Nows, which I could have missed anyway, or Buy-It-Nows older than 2 days which stand less of a chance of selling.
I sit down at AuctionHero a day later and it starts by showing me any new Buy-It-Nows listed in the last day, before showing me a mix of stuff that is buyable and listed more than a day ago, along with any listing ending in a day. If I go through another 1,000 listings, I might have seen everything 7 days out.
Rinse and repeat. You can start with unmanageable searches and quickly whittle them down, all the while staying on top of anything new and juicy, and seeing everything before it ends. You never see anything you have already seen.
It's a colossal time-saver, and it makes eBay actually feasible for many kinds of searches that are just too unwieldy to even consider otherwise.
And when you can blackball any seller with just a couple clicks, it frequently shrinks the number of results by thousands.
@FadeToBlack said:
Oh, I see now, I add search groups and search within each search group. Not super intuitive but I get it now.
Got any suggestions for how to make it easier to understand? I admit that I struggle with this frequently.
@FadeToBlack said:
Suggestion, add a filter that allows the user to set the program to only show listings from the past x days, that way I'm not parsing crap that has been on ebay for months.
The post above explains the motivation, and I think it shows how if you only want to see listings from the past X days, you can easily configure that with filters and simply stop scanning when you start seeing listings shown that are from the past X+1 days.
Please note that AuctionHero really isn't designed for your use-case. I'm not telling you not to use it, and I would like to support your use better, but I would not be surprised if there was a better site out there for you. There are a couple things I can add that might help you achieve some of your goals, and one or two things that I won't add (and I'll explain why).
A filter for Good-Til-Canceled listings
It's technically possible for me to identify these listings, which have an apparent Start Time of no more than 30 days ago, but which may actually have been first listed months or even years prior. Allowing you to turn these off would probably help certain kinds of searches, such as your snipe-like behavior.
A filter for Listing Duration
This filter, which would allow you to toggle 1, 3, 5, 7, 10, or 30 day listings on and off, would actually make AuctionHero even more efficient on the back-end. But is it really what you want? Maybe you want a filter for Auctions by duration and then a separate filter for Buy-It-Nows by duration? Again, I have my doubts that this is going to help you.
What I won't add
The software costs money to run. Servers, databases, traffic, whatever. Additionally, it consumes a limited resource -- queries to eBay. There is no guarantee that the software will continue to work after those queries are used up, and the available queries are shared by all users of the system.
I cannot afford to make queries of eBay for data that I don't actually present to the user because that data is filtered by AuctionHero itself -- I'd just be wasting queries. By making the user wade through all the results that we actually retrieve from eBay, it incentivizes the user to constrain their consumption of the limited resources of the system.
This means that whatever I invest in infrastructure and fees is essentially matched by the investment of time/energy by the user. That's a fair deal. Or, it would be if I was able to break even!
@FadeToBlack said:
The easiest way to implement my specific use that would reduce the back-end load is to not retrieve stuff on ebay now and instead just show new stuff as it populates the listings. Call it "chaser mode" or something. I mean, realistically, the kind of deals I'm looking for don't last more than 30 minutes to an hour anyway.
to not retrieve stuff on ebay now ???
It's constantly looking for new items. With very low and very high watermarks, it will fetch a few items and then continuously search for a minimal interval to fill up your very large cache.
With very large searches using your watermarks -- anything over 172,800 results -- holes will form in the cache, because the minimum interval it will look for is 12 seconds, while minimum frequency of searches is 15 seconds. The solution is to change your watermarks or reduce the search space or scan through more stuff. I will probably be "fixing" this behavior with a change to how we calculate how many results to fetch, but though I've tested with searches that produce over 50,000,000 results, you're the first user who actually uses it this way.
Again, it's really not designed to sit there idle and then get used at a frantic pace only once every few minutes.
It sounds like what you want is to automatically remove from the cache anything that was listed more than X minutes ago, and further, than you are only interested in newly listed items. The former treads dangerously close to AuctionHero doing more work than the user, but the later is entirely doable. I will make a ticket to add that.
Sound playing is working for me, but changing the URL isn't, for some reason! I will work on that shortly.
The audio alerts might not work the way you expect. They are designed to just alert you when a new item is found and is thrown up on the screen. The idea is that you don't want it warning you every time it finds something -- that could mean every few seconds. So if you exhaust all the results and the screen is empty, you'll get an alert if something new is listed that matches your searches.
Sound playing is working for me, but changing the URL isn't, for some reason! I will work on that shortly.
Okay, that's fixed -- you will need to reload the site after 5-10 minutes so the caches have a chance to clear.
However, that URL will not work because the site hosting the sound has blocked any use of the sound outside of their site itself. You could probably download the audio and put it on Dropbox or something, so that you could host it yourself.
Hey, big thanks for finding a bug. I appreciate it!
@FadeToBlack said:
That's how the GSA search I'm running is working right now. Since I've now viewed and dismissed every listing in coins with "GSA" it's only showing me the newly populated listings. Being able to do this without having to manually add them all to the cache is the ideal concept.
There used to be a feature called Fast Forward, which was the opposite of Rewind. Instead of emptying the knowledge of what you had seen from the Search Group, it would tell the Search Group that you had seen everything. Subsequent to a Fast Forward, you would see only newer stuff, but the system would otherwise function identically.
Is Fast Forward what you want?
@FadeToBlack said:
If it retains the cache/database continuously, that would mean I will never see the stuff I've passed up until it is relisted.
That is, of course, the way it works now. If you've passed on an item, you will never see it until it is relisted -- effectively becoming a new item with, perhaps, a new price/description/photo/etc.
But, that won't change, right? A Fast Forward is a one-time operation, or perhaps one that you perform after first sitting down to look at eBay, which sorta resets your position in the search results to the very end of the tape, so to speak.
BTW, I took Fast Forward out because it was melting people's brains. No one could understand what it was or why they would want it.
RE the audio alerts, does the tab have to be open? I'm still not getting them. OSX 10.10.13 and Chrome Version 58.0.3029.110 (64-bit). I just now tried your suggestion RE dropbox, so we will see if that works...
You have to have the site open and you have to have selected the Search Group you want alerts upon. The system only executes searches when the AuctionHero site is open in a browser; otherwise it would violate my make-the-user-work-almost-as-much-as-we-work rule.
@FadeToBlack said:
Fast forward is exactly what I want. Let me start with a clean slate every time I sit down.
I'm working on releasing an inventory system for coins at the moment, but as a temporary work-around until Fast Forward is back, you could make the system work better for you by logging off when you won't be using it. When you login again, the cache will be fresher.
Were you able to host a sound file on Dropbox and have it play in AuctionHero? I haven't actually tried this, so I'm curious...
@FadeToBlack said:
Still no sound fwiw. I'll mess with it more tonight.
If you go to the Setup page and enable the New Item Audio (the slider should flip to the right-hand side and the slider background should turn green) and also hit the blue link Revert to Default in the top-right of the New Item Audio panel header so that the Audio Source URL reverts to ///audio/smw_power-up.wav then you can at least confirm that sound is working. Then it's a simple matter of using a URL that works as well.
I might push a new version today that will give you an alert to warn of an inability to load an audio URL. This could help your debugging of a custom URL if you can first confirm that sound is actually playing for you...
I'm pushing a new version with the following changes:
the default audio URL was updated, as somehow the old one broke; Revert to Default should now yield /audio/smw_power-up.wav which definitely works
when you toggle audio on and off, AuctionHero now attempts to play the audio you've specified so you can make sure it works; this makes it easier to test an audio URL
if AuctionHero isn't able to download the audio, it will throw up an error message so you know to specify an alternate URL
Just created a new account without any issues. I will ask some other users in Philly to do some testing for me, but there's at least one other user in the western suburbs -- Media -- who is online right now and doesn't seem to be having any problems.
Who is your network provider? Verizon seems to be fine.
@FadeToBlack said:
Yeah, it's working as intended though. I don't want to trawl a backlog of old search results, the best stuff gets purchased within 3 minutes or so of populating in the listing results.
I want to see maybe 20 items at a time, quickly clear them, and move on. Ideally it would repopulate every 5 seconds or so with stuff I haven't seen.
Also, prices should be here;
Moving my eye all the way across a 15" screen is a lot harder than just moving my eye over an inch and down 8-10 inches to check the other populated results.
Also, it shows by oldest in the queue and there's no way to change that. Obviously I'm more interested in the newest.
This! Also, sound is working for me. I'm just starting to play around with everything now.
Moving my eye all the way across a 15" screen is a lot harder than just moving my eye over an inch and down 8-10 inches to check the other populated results.
One of the issues here is that the image size can vary. It's advantageous to have certain pieces of key information show up in the same spot in each panel of each result; price, "freshness", shipping options, some seller statistics.
If we can come up with a short list of those critical details, perhaps we can shuffle everything around and have those bits show up at four (or 6?) corners of a new layout. Dealers tend to be interested in different data, so I really need some direction from other folks to give me some ideas on what the critical bits are that you need to make a quick "PASS" decision.
Making a "PLAY" decision is obviously something you can take a bit more time to dig into, but the goal is to skip through the junk you don't want as fast as possible.
Also, it shows by oldest in the queue and there's no way to change that. Obviously I'm more interested in the newest.
Just ran AuctionHero on a very old version of Chrome. There are some subtle defects and/or missing ingredients in older browsers which I apparently have not been able to fully overcome. If you are seeing confusing behavior with AuctionHero, such as results loaded and then vanishing, or searches not fetching results, your problems may stem from an older browser.
In every case, and with any site, you are going to have the best possible experience and the most security with the latest version of your browser -- and Chrome is currently the most advanced of the bunch. Please upgrade whenever possible!
I gave up, even after you fixed my search criteria, when I click on the results I get Nothing but an empty screen. I tried it on PC, Apple and Android platforms witn the same results. I think it's a good concept but not user friendly in the least. No offense, just saying.
It's feedback, and I appreciate it, but I honestly don't know what to tell you (at least, without more information). I know a number of people here are successfully using the site to find coins.
You type a name for your search and add some keywords and it's literally five (5) clicks from your first login to seeing results on the screen. That really isn't much.
Yes, it's not exactly intuitive, depending on what you intuit of the software. I am always interested in ideas on how to better explain the concept or how to make the interface more obvious. Any crazy idea is appreciated. However, it's definitely worth putting a bit of time in. Maybe @FadeToBlack can comment on whether it has been worth the effort.
The average eBay user spends over 16 minutes on eBay per day. I believe that many of us spend much more time sifting through garbage on eBay. I would say 30-60 minutes is a more accurate estimate for coin folks.
Here is a graphic which might give you some idea of just how much time it might be worth spending on making AuctionHero do the work for you:
What is your time worth? I think a lot of users could probably afford to spend at least 5-8 weeks configuring AuctionHero, based upon this xkcd cartoon.
FWIW, I watched disruptek buy lots of great deals on eBay back in the day. Based on that, and knowing that he must have improved the software greatly since then, I'm confident that it's well worth a try. Even if he is a spammer.
Andy Lustig
Doggedly collecting coins of the Central American Republic.
Visit the Society of US Pattern Collectors at USPatterns.com.
@disruptek said:
I was convinced to go after a software patent and, since that involves revealing how the technology works, it became a question of defending the IP with aggressive development of a product to serve as the embodiment for the patent claim and to discourage infringement.
Have you gotten recent and competent patent advise on this? After Alice, it's become very hard to patent software. After that 2014 decision, trade secrets are a bit more attractive. Then came last year...
In 2014, the US Supreme Court dealt a major blow to software patents. In their 9-0 ruling in Alice Corp v. CLS Bank, the justices made it clear that just adding fancy-sounding computer language to otherwise ordinary aspects of business and technology isn't enough to deserve a patent.
All is not lost, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has found several cases where software is still patentable.
Except, no post-Alice cases have reached back to the Supremes, so it's not clear if the new rules will survive.
And the Federal Circuit has a dismal record on appeals to SCOTUS (whether this is because SCOTUS only takes cases where enough judges already feel the decision is wrong ... selection bias ... isn't clear).
-----Burton ANA 50 year/Life Member (now "Emeritus")
@MrEureka said:
FWIW, I watched disruptek buy lots of great deals on eBay back in the day. Based on that, and knowing that he must have improved the software greatly since then, I'm confident that it's well worth a try. Even if he is a spammer.
Awww, thanks, and a tip o' the hat to @MrEureka. Long time no see! Denver ANA?
Comments
If you're curious, this is the data that I snoop (if I snoop); basically, it tells me whether the software is fulfilling the performance promise:
Mostly I stare at this:
877-DISRPTK
That would be a monumental endeavor.
How about counterfeit listings, it would take a human eye and due diligence to check every listing before the purchase is initiated, but it's a good idea I guess for someone who will spend the time to develop it right.
eBay ID-bruceshort978
Successful BST:here and ATS, bumanchu, wdrob, hashtag, KeeNoooo, mikej61, Yonico, Meltdown, BAJJERFAN, Excaliber, lordmarcovan, cucamongacoin, robkool, bradyc, tonedcointrader, mumu, Windycity, astrotrain, tizofthe, overdate, rwyarmch, mkman123, Timbuk3,GBurger717, airplanenut, coinkid855 ,illini420, michaeldixon, Weiss, Morpheus, Deepcoin, Collectorcoins, AUandAG, D.Schwager.
Based on some of the grading I've seen recently, this may already have been implemented by at least one TPG.
877-DISRPTK
A previous version of the software OCR'd the serial numbers off slabs and verified them at the services. I also experimented with reading the barcodes but to be honest, it was pretty hit or miss. Maybe with today's better-quality images, it'd be easier.
If you had a list of, say, stolen coins, it wouldn't be too hard to have a piece of code keep an eye out for them.
The trick, of course, is to identify the counterfeit coins in bogus holders. I don't see that happening any time soon.
877-DISRPTK
Barcode reading would be the way to go, presently. Because that is what is the most obviously apparent flaw in the counterfeits that we have seen recently. Also the label font could be used as a secondary verification. Nothing will be foolproof, and I wouldn't trust any program to pull the trigger on anything over $50. And as the software improves, so will the ripoff artist.
eBay ID-bruceshort978
Successful BST:here and ATS, bumanchu, wdrob, hashtag, KeeNoooo, mikej61, Yonico, Meltdown, BAJJERFAN, Excaliber, lordmarcovan, cucamongacoin, robkool, bradyc, tonedcointrader, mumu, Windycity, astrotrain, tizofthe, overdate, rwyarmch, mkman123, Timbuk3,GBurger717, airplanenut, coinkid855 ,illini420, michaeldixon, Weiss, Morpheus, Deepcoin, Collectorcoins, AUandAG, D.Schwager.
Fade to Black
you must work for a Government... checking personal email so often....????
First, when you create a seller list and add sellers to it, it's stored separately from the search. So, you can associate that blacklist of crooks with as many searches as you want, or no searches at all. The only way to lose the blacklist is to manually delete it on the Seller Lists tab of the Search page.
Second, you can make as many Search Groups as you want! Each one retains its own memory of which time periods you've seen. For example:
Search Group: barber coinage
Search Group: some cents
Perhaps a bad example because you could simply implement these as single searches of multiple categories, but I hope you get the idea.
If I've scanned through both search groups a day earlier and I select the barber coinage group, it's going to show me all the barber quarters and dimes that have been listed in the last day. If I don't look at the some cents group until tomorrow, it will have two days of results to show me.
Once you've added multiple Search Groups, there are two ways to switch between them. Either click the View Results link in each Search Group's panel on the Search page, or after you're on the Results page, simply click the Results navigation tab again. It will give you a dropdown that shows each of your Search Groups and a badge indicating how many items exist in their caches.
Note that the system only retrieves results for the selected Search Group and only if all searches in the Search Group have been validated, but it will fetch results regardless of where you are in the app.
877-DISRPTK
So I mentioned that each Search Group keeps track of which time periods you've seen. That's what you see in the progress bar below each Search Group on the Search page.
When you add a search to a Search Group, it is used for future progress that you make through the Search Group, but we don't retroactively go back and retrieve results for the time periods we already searched.
If you want to start over and see all the results, both of any existing searches in the Search Group, and any new searches that you added, you hit the yellow Rewind button on the Search Group panel. This empties the Search Group and causes you to start over with with all the results from all the searches in the Search Group.
877-DISRPTK
FTB, so did you find anything to buy using this or are custom searches still the way to go?
I want to explain a little about the motivation for AuctionHero, which might make its utility more clear. This is kinda complicated, which is why I recommend that people just try using it for a couple days.
Let's say that I'm a dealer who specializes in FE cents and I want to see everything in the Flying Eagle Small Cents category, which has ~5,000 listings. I browse eBay most weekday evenings, but on Mondays and Thursdays I do my accounting, which usually means I spend half the night fighting with QuickBooks and the other half crying into my scotch.
eBay is designed to show you lots of listings, as many times as possible. They want you to see everything, and ideally multiple times. They want you to have the impression that everything is "fresh" and that you'll miss something if you don't see everything over and over, every day.
They are actually right, at least about the last part. The problem is that when I sit down to see the new stuff on eBay, I have two ways to try to find listings I haven't seen previously in the last 1-3 days; I can sort by Ending Soonest or Newly Listed.
Ending Soonest: These listings are going to include stuff that I already saw, interleaved with new stuff that happens to be ending soon, so that's basically untenable.
Newly Listed: This material is all new, but a three day listing that started almost three days ago is going to take me awhile to find -- so long that it might actually end before I see it.
AuctionHero solves this problem. For any search, of any size, regardless of how often you view the results, when you view the results, or how much of the result set you've viewed,
If I load up my Flying Eagle search, the first results that it shows me are going to be buyable items just posted, or any item that is just about to end. I need to see these first, because there's a greater chance that someone might buy that wicked Buy-It-Now the longer it remains listed, and obviously, I cannot buy an item that is about to end if I'm focused elsewhere and the listing ends. Similarly, if I'm looking at items Ending Soonest, I'm going to miss an awesome Buy-It-Now just posted.
If I browse through 500 Flying Eagle cents, then maybe the system is showing me listings that are buyable, and were listed (say) 2 days ago, or listings that are ending in (say) 2 days. At this point, I can walk away from the computer and I know that if I come back tomorrow, I'm not going to miss ANY listings that are ending normally. The only stuff I might miss are new Buy-It-Nows, which I could have missed anyway, or Buy-It-Nows older than 2 days which stand less of a chance of selling.
I sit down at AuctionHero a day later and it starts by showing me any new Buy-It-Nows listed in the last day, before showing me a mix of stuff that is buyable and listed more than a day ago, along with any listing ending in a day. If I go through another 1,000 listings, I might have seen everything 7 days out.
Rinse and repeat. You can start with unmanageable searches and quickly whittle them down, all the while staying on top of anything new and juicy, and seeing everything before it ends. You never see anything you have already seen.
It's a colossal time-saver, and it makes eBay actually feasible for many kinds of searches that are just too unwieldy to even consider otherwise.
And when you can blackball any seller with just a couple clicks, it frequently shrinks the number of results by thousands.
877-DISRPTK
Got any suggestions for how to make it easier to understand? I admit that I struggle with this frequently.
The post above explains the motivation, and I think it shows how if you only want to see listings from the past X days, you can easily configure that with filters and simply stop scanning when you start seeing listings shown that are from the past X+1 days.
Please note that AuctionHero really isn't designed for your use-case. I'm not telling you not to use it, and I would like to support your use better, but I would not be surprised if there was a better site out there for you. There are a couple things I can add that might help you achieve some of your goals, and one or two things that I won't add (and I'll explain why).
It's technically possible for me to identify these listings, which have an apparent Start Time of no more than 30 days ago, but which may actually have been first listed months or even years prior. Allowing you to turn these off would probably help certain kinds of searches, such as your snipe-like behavior.
This filter, which would allow you to toggle 1, 3, 5, 7, 10, or 30 day listings on and off, would actually make AuctionHero even more efficient on the back-end. But is it really what you want? Maybe you want a filter for Auctions by duration and then a separate filter for Buy-It-Nows by duration? Again, I have my doubts that this is going to help you.
The software costs money to run. Servers, databases, traffic, whatever. Additionally, it consumes a limited resource -- queries to eBay. There is no guarantee that the software will continue to work after those queries are used up, and the available queries are shared by all users of the system.
I cannot afford to make queries of eBay for data that I don't actually present to the user because that data is filtered by AuctionHero itself -- I'd just be wasting queries. By making the user wade through all the results that we actually retrieve from eBay, it incentivizes the user to constrain their consumption of the limited resources of the system.
This means that whatever I invest in infrastructure and fees is essentially matched by the investment of time/energy by the user. That's a fair deal. Or, it would be if I was able to break even!
877-DISRPTK
You can add multiple searches in each Search Group. They all have to be validated for the Search Group to retrieve results, however.
877-DISRPTK
to not retrieve stuff on ebay now ???
It's constantly looking for new items. With very low and very high watermarks, it will fetch a few items and then continuously search for a minimal interval to fill up your very large cache.
With very large searches using your watermarks -- anything over 172,800 results -- holes will form in the cache, because the minimum interval it will look for is 12 seconds, while minimum frequency of searches is 15 seconds. The solution is to change your watermarks or reduce the search space or scan through more stuff. I will probably be "fixing" this behavior with a change to how we calculate how many results to fetch, but though I've tested with searches that produce over 50,000,000 results, you're the first user who actually uses it this way.
Again, it's really not designed to sit there idle and then get used at a frantic pace only once every few minutes.
It sounds like what you want is to automatically remove from the cache anything that was listed more than X minutes ago, and further, than you are only interested in newly listed items. The former treads dangerously close to AuctionHero doing more work than the user, but the later is entirely doable. I will make a ticket to add that.
Sound playing is working for me, but changing the URL isn't, for some reason! I will work on that shortly.
The audio alerts might not work the way you expect. They are designed to just alert you when a new item is found and is thrown up on the screen. The idea is that you don't want it warning you every time it finds something -- that could mean every few seconds. So if you exhaust all the results and the screen is empty, you'll get an alert if something new is listed that matches your searches.
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Okay, that's fixed -- you will need to reload the site after 5-10 minutes so the caches have a chance to clear.
However, that URL will not work because the site hosting the sound has blocked any use of the sound outside of their site itself. You could probably download the audio and put it on Dropbox or something, so that you could host it yourself.
Hey, big thanks for finding a bug. I appreciate it!
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There used to be a feature called Fast Forward, which was the opposite of Rewind. Instead of emptying the knowledge of what you had seen from the Search Group, it would tell the Search Group that you had seen everything. Subsequent to a Fast Forward, you would see only newer stuff, but the system would otherwise function identically.
Is Fast Forward what you want?
That is, of course, the way it works now. If you've passed on an item, you will never see it until it is relisted -- effectively becoming a new item with, perhaps, a new price/description/photo/etc.
But, that won't change, right? A Fast Forward is a one-time operation, or perhaps one that you perform after first sitting down to look at eBay, which sorta resets your position in the search results to the very end of the tape, so to speak.
BTW, I took Fast Forward out because it was melting people's brains. No one could understand what it was or why they would want it.
You have to have the site open and you have to have selected the Search Group you want alerts upon. The system only executes searches when the AuctionHero site is open in a browser; otherwise it would violate my make-the-user-work-almost-as-much-as-we-work rule.
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You need the tab open, but it doesn't need to be in the foreground unless your web-browser doesn't play sounds from background tabs.
Okay, cool. I will make a ticket to reimplement it.
Maybe, but it seemed useful to me the first time I implemented it.
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I'm working on releasing an inventory system for coins at the moment, but as a temporary work-around until Fast Forward is back, you could make the system work better for you by logging off when you won't be using it. When you login again, the cache will be fresher.
Were you able to host a sound file on Dropbox and have it play in AuctionHero? I haven't actually tried this, so I'm curious...
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If you go to the Setup page and enable the New Item Audio (the slider should flip to the right-hand side and the slider background should turn green) and also hit the blue link Revert to Default in the top-right of the New Item Audio panel header so that the Audio Source URL reverts to ///audio/smw_power-up.wav then you can at least confirm that sound is working. Then it's a simple matter of using a URL that works as well.
I might push a new version today that will give you an alert to warn of an inability to load an audio URL. This could help your debugging of a custom URL if you can first confirm that sound is actually playing for you...
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I'm pushing a new version with the following changes:
This should get you working!
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Huh. Seems to be working for me. Try a hard refresh?
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That's an error from the authentication provider and not something I can control -- I just display the error message there.
I just tested Facebook logins and they are working for me. I assume that you're able to login to Facebook directly.
Where are you located?
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Just created a new account without any issues. I will ask some other users in Philly to do some testing for me, but there's at least one other user in the western suburbs -- Media -- who is online right now and doesn't seem to be having any problems.
Who is your network provider? Verizon seems to be fine.
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This! Also, sound is working for me. I'm just starting to play around with everything now.
One of the issues here is that the image size can vary. It's advantageous to have certain pieces of key information show up in the same spot in each panel of each result; price, "freshness", shipping options, some seller statistics.
If we can come up with a short list of those critical details, perhaps we can shuffle everything around and have those bits show up at four (or 6?) corners of a new layout. Dealers tend to be interested in different data, so I really need some direction from other folks to give me some ideas on what the critical bits are that you need to make a quick "PASS" decision.
Making a "PLAY" decision is obviously something you can take a bit more time to dig into, but the goal is to skip through the junk you don't want as fast as possible.
Hey @FadeToBlack, what does this mean?
Cool, please feel free to exercise the live chat for immediate help, and thanks for the feedback.
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do you still list coins on ebay?
I don't, but my pan-n-zoom images might be returning to eBay.
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Just ran AuctionHero on a very old version of Chrome. There are some subtle defects and/or missing ingredients in older browsers which I apparently have not been able to fully overcome. If you are seeing confusing behavior with AuctionHero, such as results loaded and then vanishing, or searches not fetching results, your problems may stem from an older browser.
In every case, and with any site, you are going to have the best possible experience and the most security with the latest version of your browser -- and Chrome is currently the most advanced of the bunch. Please upgrade whenever possible!
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I gave up, even after you fixed my search criteria, when I click on the results I get Nothing but an empty screen. I tried it on PC, Apple and Android platforms witn the same results. I think it's a good concept but not user friendly in the least. No offense, just saying.
eBay ID-bruceshort978
Successful BST:here and ATS, bumanchu, wdrob, hashtag, KeeNoooo, mikej61, Yonico, Meltdown, BAJJERFAN, Excaliber, lordmarcovan, cucamongacoin, robkool, bradyc, tonedcointrader, mumu, Windycity, astrotrain, tizofthe, overdate, rwyarmch, mkman123, Timbuk3,GBurger717, airplanenut, coinkid855 ,illini420, michaeldixon, Weiss, Morpheus, Deepcoin, Collectorcoins, AUandAG, D.Schwager.
It's feedback, and I appreciate it, but I honestly don't know what to tell you (at least, without more information). I know a number of people here are successfully using the site to find coins.
You type a name for your search and add some keywords and it's literally five (5) clicks from your first login to seeing results on the screen. That really isn't much.
Yes, it's not exactly intuitive, depending on what you intuit of the software. I am always interested in ideas on how to better explain the concept or how to make the interface more obvious. Any crazy idea is appreciated. However, it's definitely worth putting a bit of time in. Maybe @FadeToBlack can comment on whether it has been worth the effort.
The average eBay user spends over 16 minutes on eBay per day. I believe that many of us spend much more time sifting through garbage on eBay. I would say 30-60 minutes is a more accurate estimate for coin folks.
Here is a graphic which might give you some idea of just how much time it might be worth spending on making AuctionHero do the work for you:
What is your time worth? I think a lot of users could probably afford to spend at least 5-8 weeks configuring AuctionHero, based upon this xkcd cartoon.
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FWIW, I watched disruptek buy lots of great deals on eBay back in the day. Based on that, and knowing that he must have improved the software greatly since then, I'm confident that it's well worth a try. Even if he is a spammer.
Doggedly collecting coins of the Central American Republic.
Visit the Society of US Pattern Collectors at USPatterns.com.
Have you gotten recent and competent patent advise on this? After Alice, it's become very hard to patent software. After that 2014 decision, trade secrets are a bit more attractive. Then came last year...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/12/these-three-2016-cases-gave-new-life-to-software-patents/
All is not lost, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has found several cases where software is still patentable.
Except, no post-Alice cases have reached back to the Supremes, so it's not clear if the new rules will survive.
And the Federal Circuit has a dismal record on appeals to SCOTUS (whether this is because SCOTUS only takes cases where enough judges already feel the decision is wrong ... selection bias ... isn't clear).
ANA 50 year/Life Member (now "Emeritus")
Awww, thanks, and a tip o' the hat to @MrEureka. Long time no see! Denver ANA?
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