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TAGnotes Thu 14 Sep 2000 Vol 2 Number 133 Issue 215 |
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The
Auction Guild Notes for Thursday 14 Sep 2000
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*******VOTE******* VOTE******* VOTE********
The Million Auction March wants to move you to VOTE.
List your items on V enues O ther T han E bay
For more information go to http://www.millionauctionmarch.com
New Auction Houses, Sales Venues and Service Providers are
joining daily. All are offering incentives and specials to the OAI.
If you have any comments, questions, information, ideas or
suggestions please email us at tagn-@theauctionguild.com
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ebaY reported on 13Sep 21:57:17 PT that Description Search indexing
is not working and is taking in excess of 24 hours and continues to
fall behind. In order to decrease the time required to complete an
indexing cycle, ebaY made an emergency change to capture only
information for newly listed items. Changes to items that are already
indexed are not indexed in this process, including edited titles and
description changes. This change will remain in place until ebaY has
fixed Description Search. TAG recommends that if you have to change
an auction title or description, END the auction, request credit and
relist it.
After working well for a few days, on 14 Sep ebaY started having
site problems again. These were not reported by ebaY but by users
on the ebaY boards and other OAI boards. At 07:54:36 PT Relist
stopped working. At 09:49:44 PT problems with opening item pages
started, with users getting messages that the item was invalid, and
no longer in the database. At 10:13:54 Cookies started getting lost
so users had to repeatedly enter their information. At 12:58:37 PT
eBay reported its home page was unavailable. They claimed the
site was available, but posts on the boards belied that claim.
ebaY suggested the use of links to gain access, listings through
the Category Overview Page or through the Search Page at
http://listings.ebay.com/ or
http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?GetResult&query=
User activity through My ebaY at
http://cgi1.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?MyEbayLogin
At 14:39:28 they announced the home page was back and reiterated
that the site was available during the outage. ebaY claims the
cause of the event was external, and they are trying to find the hacker.
The Pic server was reported down 13:20:58 PT. At 13:24:12 PT users
reported that search was bringing up network error messages.
Cgi3, cgi5, were reported with intermittent problems, and search
continued to be intermittently unavailable until 17:40:40 PT. At
19:19 cgi6 went down, and at 07:23:31 users reported ebaY down
completely. It was back up at 19:48 but only intermittently with users
unable to access My ebaY, search working intermittently, listing pages
not working, relisting not working and the feedback forum down. At
20:08 cgi3 was giving the page cannot be displayed, the page you are
looking for is currently unavailable messages. As of this printing
sporadic problems and general site slowness continue to be reported.
eBay will be down for regularly scheduled maintenance on Friday
15 Sep between 01:00 PT and 03:00 PT. This is a shorter time than
normal, and at this time TAG does NOT recommend anyone listing
items that would end between 03:00 and 05:00 on the following Friday.
Billpoint will be unavailable for maintenance on Friday 15 Sep
between 22:00:01 PT and 02:00:00 PT Saturday 16 Sept.
All functions for Billpoint will be down, including registration,
invoicing, transaction processing and customer inquiries.
ebaY has partnered with Andale Honesty.Com to provide free counters for
sellers. In the next two weeks, ebaY will introduce this feature on the
Sell Your Item form.
http://pages.ebay.com/help/sellerguide/counters.html
eBay University will be held on Saturday, 23 Sep and Sunday,
24 Sep in Los Angeles, California. For details go to
http://www.ebay.com/university/
eBay's Visa television commercial was selected as Best Spot for the
month of July by Adweek. The ad has been on major U.S. television
networks since 5 Jul, and ebaY claims there has been a significant
increase in site traffic and trading activities on eBay. This TV
ad campaign was aimed at increasing usage of eBay's Billpoint.
ebaY continues to offer buyers $1. off if they can coerce sellers
into using Billpoint. For more information go to
http://www.billpoint.com/promotion/dollaroff.html
You can view the commercial with a QuickTime plug-in at
http://pages.ebay.com/help/buyerguide/bp-visa.html
eBay in a letter to power sellers is again looking at tracking users
bidding habits and using technology that ebaY calls Related Item
Finder. The Related Item Finder reviews a buyer's bidding activity,
and using related concepts, recommends other items that are similar
or related to items a buyer has bid on or purchased.
ebaY is looking at including
1.Suggestions within My ebaY
2.Links on ended auction items - Bidding is closed for this item. Show
me more items like this
3.Unsuccessful auction emails - Unfortunately, you did not win this
item. However, we have found the following current auctions for
you that are similar to this item.
There is currently no launch date for this.
eBay Picture Services are now available in twelve core categories.
Antiques & Art; Books, Movies, Music; Coins & Stamps; Collectibles;
Computers; Dolls, Doll Houses; Jewelry, Gemstones; Photo &
Electronics; Pottery & Glass; Sports; Toys, Bean Bag Plush;
Everything Else. Picture Services are not available on eBay Autos
or Great Collections. Photo hosting beta links are on the sell index
page http://pages.ebay.com/sell/index.html
Two photos per listing are free additional 4 photos is 50 cents,
and slide show format is $1. Input can be sent via email to
sugg-@ebay.com. Include Picture Services in the subject line.
TAG does not recommend using ebaY's pic hosting because they
require users to download an ActiveX file, an invasive tracking file.
ebaY Contact Information and Toll Free Phone Numbers can now be
found on the TAG website
http://www.auctionguild.com/generic.html;$sessionid$
RDYY0JYAAAV0JWGIHUWHBMWYZA4S1PX0?pid=17
Problems with Half.Com were discussed on the OAI boards.
There appears to be an issue with the site giving confirmations
for sales that did not exist, and not giving confirmation of sales
of those that were completed. For more details go to
http://www.auctionwatch.com/mesg/read.html?num=2&thread=255239
Approx 5.1 million current listing
http://www2.ebay.com/aw/announce.shtml
* * * * *
Yahoo Auctions has improved its site map. This is now a much
more valuable tool for navigating the site.
http://auctions.yahoo.com/phtml/auc/us/promo/sitemap.html
Basic site information http://www.auctionguild.com
Go to OAI Site Basic Details from left side toolbar.
13 Sep actual count 2.32 million. For all category counts for Yahoo
and eBay go to http://www.dtmagazine.com/auctioncounts.html
http://auctions.yahoo.com/
* * * * *
Amazon Auctions new privacy agreement has caused problems in
the cyberspace. EPIC and Junkbusters, two online privacy
organizations, have severely criticized Amazon on the grounds
that the new agreement allows Amazon to sell user information.
There are also law suits against Amazon based on last years
problems with Alexa. EPIC has been using Amazon to distribute
their books and information, and they have withdrawn from their
relationship in protest. For more information go to
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-2768061.html?tag=
st.ne.1007.thed.ni
Basic site information http://www.auctionguild.com
Go to OAI Site Basic Details from left side toolbar.
http://www.amazon.com
* * * * *
Honesty reported at 15:19 CT 14 Sep, View Counters, Add Counters
and One-Step Lister were not working properly. Honesty took the site
down from 2am to 6am on 15 Sep for maintenance. There have been
on going reports on the OAI boards of problems with Honesty hosted
pics not showing up on auctions. This problem has been showing up
frequently enough that users were asking other users about alternative
recommendations for pic hosting services. http://www.honesty.com
* * * * *
PayPal is scheduled to call TAG on 15 Sep. We hope to get
clarification as to what does and does not require a business
or premier account. The links below are to PayPal's original
user agreement saved by an OAI user.
http://server3002.freeyellow.com/j-d/pay-pal-for-auctions.html
http://server3002.freeyellow.com/j-d/uses.html
http://server3002.freeyellow.com/j-d/logo.html
http://server3002.freeyellow.com/j-d/terms-of-use.html
http://www.paypal.com
https://secure.paypal.x.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_registration-run
* * * * *
OAUA first anniversary celebrations can be found at
http://auctionusers.org/birthday/birthday.html
JOIN the OAUA today. http://www.oaua.com
* * * * *
Fire Harms OAI Family - Can YOU help?
This family had a fire in which they lost their house, and
one of their children was severely burned and injured.
OAI folks have started a fund for them and all help
would be appreciated. Link to the fundraising/prayer/well wishes site
http://hometown.aol.com/for2pfirefund/index.html
Link to thread on ebaY
http://remarq.ebay.com/ebay/transcript.asp?g=discuss%2Eebay%2Ethe
%2Debay&tn=48487&sh=fc7471cd3500fe35&idx=-1
The PayPal address for donations to the family is
gram-@yahoo.com which goes directly to the Perkin's family payPal
account, or you can send a check to the addresses on the website.
* * * * *
If you would like an Auction House or Service Provider added to
this list, please email us at tag@theauctionguild.com
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