5 May
2014
5 May
'14
8:54 p.m.
In article <536580C2.2000506 at jwsss.com>,
jwsmobile <jws at jwsss.com> writes:
[...] there is no justification to
drop in and run up the bid and clearly not want it other than either
being a shill or an asshole.
Why do you assume that anybody who bids early is evil? I frequently bid early for an
amount that is what I am willing to pay. If I miss out, that is life. I don't spend
every minute watching the bidding. And I don't check eBay every day for items I'm
interested in. Again, why can't I drop in an bid my limit? How does that make me a
shill or an asshole?
I do get most of my bids, by the way. Not every item goes to the snipers.
In fact, I find sniping a foul practise. If I put an item up for sale and have no bids, I
will cancel the auction 24 hours before the final date.
Billy Pettit
5 May
5 May
9:34 p.m.
On 5/5/2014 8:54 PM, Billy Pettit wrote:
In article <536580C2.2000506 at jwsss.com>,
jwsmobile <jws at jwsss.com> writes:
I did not say that early
bidding was bad. I said a certain practice was
bad, and only a narrow one.
If you want to put out a bid early, fine. You will certainly be the
target of the ones want to spend your money if they are practicing what
I said.
[...] there is no justification to
drop in and run up the bid and clearly not want it other than either
being a shill or an asshole.
Why do you assume that anybody who bids early is
evil? I frequently bid early for an amount that is what I am willing to pay. If I miss
out, that is life. I don't spend every minute watching the bidding. And I don't
check eBay every day for items I'm interested in. Again, why can't I drop in an
bid my limit? How does that make me a shill or an asshole? I do get most of my bids, by the way. Not every item
goes to the snipers.
In fact, I find sniping a foul practise. If I put an item up for sale and have no bids,
I will cancel the auction 24 hours before the final date.
You can do that, but you
won't get my money. I snipe precisely because
of how Ebay is structured. I see no reason to show any other bidder my
interest by putting out a bid. As Al said, you can also get the
interest level by looking at the overall count of viewers or followers.
if you have the item put out at a low price and have a lot of interest,
it might be good to raise your minimum if you structure the auction that
way.
If ebay were a true auction, and we all knew who was bidding as we used
to, the bidding practices would be different. I would not suspect the
ones who do the nattering raises and never win were shills if I could
know the ID of those bidders well enough to be sure they were different
real bidders.
But with anonymous bidding, there are enough ways for others to spend
your money to just game the system and make one large bid at the last
possible second.
There is also a psychology of having people see bidding going on that
serves the seller in a live auction. I don't think the psychology is
the same or healthy on ebay.
If you were in a silent auction with live bidders and people were doing
the crap that you see on ebay, you'd probably wait till the end and do
just one bid.
did you ever go to a coin shop bid board? The last 20 minutes is a huge
crowd of people going over their purchases and sniping.
In the same scenario, I"d be back in at 8am the next morning (or opening
time) and go over the goods for the next week, and put in a few bids,
but all the bidding would take place (in the case of when I was buying
coins Friday @ 7pm) at the last minute. Same system as Ebay, same
bidding strategy applies.
Jim
Billy Pettit
9:50 p.m.
On 5/5/2014 10:34 PM, jwsmobile wrote:
> Jim
>> Billy Pettit
Ben.
In the same scenario, I"d be back in at 8am the
next morning (or opening
time) and go over the goods for the next week, and put in a few bids,
but all the bidding would take place (in the case of when I was buying
coins Friday @ 7pm) at the last minute. Same system as Ebay, same
bidding strategy applies.
Well since the US post seems to have cut out cheap postage out of the
county I guess a lot sales of $3.00 items have dropped.Ebay to me
seems to the junk of the world. I just use buy it now and have not bid
in years.
9:55 p.m.
How Ebay works is nothing new, people adapt and have their own systems on
how to win items be it bid early or snipe. The winner is always the guy with
the biggest bid.
-----Original Message-----
From: jwsmobile
Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2014 12:34 AM
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: Re: Bidding
On 5/5/2014 8:54 PM, Billy Pettit wrote:
In article <536580C2.2000506 at jwsss.com>,
jwsmobile <jws at jwsss.com> writes:
I did not say
that early bidding was bad. I said a certain practice was
bad, and only a narrow one.
If you want to put out a bid early, fine. You will certainly be the
target of the ones want to spend your money if they are practicing what
I said.
[...] there is no justification to
drop in and run up the bid and clearly not want it other than either
being a shill or an asshole.
Why do you assume that anybody who bids early is
evil? I frequently bid
early for an amount that is what I am willing to pay. If I miss out, that
is life. I don't spend every minute watching the bidding. And I don't
check eBay every day for items I'm interested in. Again, why can't I drop
in an bid my limit? How does that make me a shill or an asshole? I do get most of my bids, by the way. Not every item
goes to the snipers.
In fact, I find sniping a foul practise. If I put an item up for sale and
have no bids, I will cancel the auction 24 hours before the final date.
You can do
that, but you won't get my money. I snipe precisely because
of how Ebay is structured. I see no reason to show any other bidder my
interest by putting out a bid. As Al said, you can also get the
interest level by looking at the overall count of viewers or followers.
if you have the item put out at a low price and have a lot of interest,
it might be good to raise your minimum if you structure the auction that
way.
If ebay were a true auction, and we all knew who was bidding as we used
to, the bidding practices would be different. I would not suspect the
ones who do the nattering raises and never win were shills if I could
know the ID of those bidders well enough to be sure they were different
real bidders.
But with anonymous bidding, there are enough ways for others to spend
your money to just game the system and make one large bid at the last
possible second.
There is also a psychology of having people see bidding going on that
serves the seller in a live auction. I don't think the psychology is
the same or healthy on ebay.
If you were in a silent auction with live bidders and people were doing
the crap that you see on ebay, you'd probably wait till the end and do
just one bid.
did you ever go to a coin shop bid board? The last 20 minutes is a huge
crowd of people going over their purchases and sniping.
In the same scenario, I"d be back in at 8am the next morning (or opening
time) and go over the goods for the next week, and put in a few bids,
but all the bidding would take place (in the case of when I was buying
coins Friday @ 7pm) at the last minute. Same system as Ebay, same
bidding strategy applies.
Jim
Billy Pettit
---
This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is
active.
http://www.avast.com
10:24 p.m.
On 05/05/2014 09:55 PM, TeoZ wrote:
How Ebay works is nothing new, people adapt and have
their own systems
on how to win items be it bid early or snipe. The winner is always the
guy with the biggest bid.
You have to know the territory--lots of people snipe--I do, for
small-ticket items because I don't want to be bothered with paying
attention to an item--but I'm not usually actively competing in a
particularly attractive item.
On the other hand, I am aware of one other area where an early bid by a
certain individual pretty much says "don't bother"--the bidder is a
corporate patent attorney for a large company and has bags of money and
what he spends isn't more important than the fact that he wants the item.
The last time he moved (courtesy of his employer), it took 11 moving
vans to shift his collection.
--Chuck
10:44 p.m.
On May 5, 2014, at 22:24 , Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
On the other hand, I am aware of one other area where
an early bid by a certain individual pretty much says "don't bother"--the
bidder is a corporate patent attorney for a large company and has bags of money and what
he spends isn't more important than the fact that he wants the item.
Now that eBay obscures bidder identity, how can one know that this certain individual has
placed a bid?
--
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/
11:19 p.m.
On 5/5/2014 10:44 PM, Mark J. Blair wrote:
Now that eBay obscures bidder identity, how can one
know that this certain individual has placed a bid?
The way I deduce identities is
to look at auctions where i'm interested
in an individual. If they win the auction, and leave feedback, i can
get their ID from the feedback.
From there on I go with them as "mr 762" or such where the feedback
count gives them away.
Just go to you list of identities and double check the count.
I don't know who Chuck is referring to, but I know of three people in
the category (and one who doesn't bid on ebay to my knowledge) that can
buy anything they like. I knew the Id's from the counts of a couple of
them as certain things were put up for sale for a while and they
vacuumed them up. I still peruse their buys for pointers to sales.
the sales I don't want to interfere with, but sellers frequently have no
clue of what they are selling. So when someone finds something I'm
interested in I like to look at the things they buy to get ideas for
new search formulas.
A few of the scientific gizmos I like to troll for people don't have any
idea what the proper name is or the description, and I've found a few by
following this strategy.
Jim
6 May
6 May
6:20 a.m.
Two things I don't like about ebay now.
One is Shill bidding has become a way of life with
some sellers. When 90% of there sales are "second chance"
you know something is wrong but ebay doesn't
do anything other than turn it into local law that have better
things to do.
The other is the clutter of items that are priced beyond anything
that I'd ever pay. Since they can stay there forever, it make searching
for new interesting items a pain.
I just don't look anymore.
I'm sure I'm missing things I want but I just don't have time
to filter through thousands of items I've see for 2 years.
Dwight
Date: Mon, 5 May 2014 23:19:11 -0700
From: jws at jwsss.com
To:
Subject: Re: Bidding
On 5/5/2014 10:44 PM, Mark J. Blair wrote:
Now that eBay obscures bidder identity, how can
one know that this certain individual has placed a bid?
The way I deduce identities
is to look at auctions where i'm interested
in an individual. If they win the auction, and leave feedback, i can
get their ID from the feedback.
From there on I go with them as "mr 762" or such where the feedback
count gives them away.
Just go to you list of identities and double check the count.
I don't know who Chuck is referring to, but I know of three people in
the category (and one who doesn't bid on ebay to my knowledge) that can
buy anything they like. I knew the Id's from the counts of a couple of
them as certain things were put up for sale for a while and they
vacuumed them up. I still peruse their buys for pointers to sales.
the sales I don't want to interfere with, but sellers frequently have no
clue of what they are selling. So when someone finds something I'm
interested in I like to look at the things they buy to get ideas for
new search formulas.
A few of the scientific gizmos I like to troll for people don't have any
idea what the proper name is or the description, and I've found a few by
following this strategy.
Jim 
8:24 a.m.
On 5/6/14 6:20 AM, dwight wrote:
Two things I don't like about ebay now.
Only two? :-)
- Javascript bloat. The site is too slow to use now except on an x86-64 on a fast network
- High levels of guessing about what you are interested in. I am NOT interested in their
suggestions or someone's 'collection'. All it does is slow down redraws.
- EVERYTHING that clutters the sides and bottom of the item lists
- removing "*" from searches
- that f*cking notification thingie you can't turn off
And my perennial complaint that you can't blacklist sellers or make a list of sellers
to
preferentially search or browse.
We have a small slush fund I get to use to buy things for CHM's collection, and I told
one
of the contributors to it last week that I haven't bought much lately because the
amount of
interesting stuff has gone down, and it has become too difficult to search for anything
that
is worth buying.
9:23 a.m.
for me the #1 thing is the almost forced use of Paypal.
On 05/ 6/14 10:24 AM, Al Kossow wrote:
On 5/6/14 6:20 AM, dwight wrote:
Two things I don't like about ebay now.
Only two? :-)
- Javascript bloat. The site is too slow to use now except on an x86-64 on a
fast network
- High levels of guessing about what you are interested in. I am NOT interested
in their
suggestions or someone's 'collection'. All it does is slow down redraws.
- EVERYTHING that clutters the sides and bottom of the item lists
- removing "*" from searches
- that f*cking notification thingie you can't turn off
And my perennial complaint that you can't blacklist sellers or make a list of
sellers to
preferentially search or browse.
We have a small slush fund I get to use to buy things for CHM's collection, and
I told one
of the contributors to it last week that I haven't bought much lately because
the amount of
interesting stuff has gone down, and it has become too difficult to search for
anything that
is worth buying.
10:19 a.m.
In article <5368FE98.3070804 at bitsavers.org>,
Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> writes:
And my perennial complaint that you can't
blacklist sellers or make a
list of sellers to preferentially search or browse.
You can adjust your searches to exclude sellers. I routinely do that
for a couple sellers that always have overpriced stuff and I'm never
interested in: computer museum, it*xpress and a couple others, I
think.
However, ebay has generally screwed up searches now. I'm considering
writing my own search scraper/email notification app because it's so
annoying. My existing searches are mostly working, but I can't
enhance them at all anymore.
I'm constantly amazed at how ebay manages to irritate more and more
of their existing customer base of buyers with every new change they
make to the web site. They seem deaf to all feedback. Have you ever
tried to file a bug about the ebay web site? They go to great
lengths to make it really difficult to file a bug. That tells you
volumes about their attitude right there. Don't even get me started
on the mess you are shown when you do view source. As someone who
develops web apps, this also reveals to me tons about their attitude.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" free book
<http://tinyurl.com/d3d-pipeline>
The Computer Graphics Museum <http://ComputerGraphicsMuseum.org>
The Terminals Wiki <http://terminals.classiccmp.org>
Legalize Adulthood! (my blog) <http://LegalizeAdulthood.wordpress.com>
10:52 a.m.
On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 10:19 AM, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote:
In article <5368FE98.3070804 at bitsavers.org>,
Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> writes:
I never care to see any of the constant flood of listings from this
single seller with multiple accounts:
ithistory,itadsplus,vintagesoftwareplus,itpostersplus,itmemorabilia,itmediaplus
And my perennial complaint that you can't
blacklist sellers or make a
list of sellers to preferentially search or browse.
You can adjust your searches to exclude sellers. I routinely do that
for a couple sellers that always have overpriced stuff and I'm never
interested in: computer museum, it*xpress and a couple others, I
think.
11:52 a.m.
This made me smile. I have a saved search that's simply the whole Vintage Computing
category with a large list of excluded sellers... including all of the specific ones
mentioned by others here! :)
I would sure like to have a permanent blacklist that automatically applies across all of
my searches. I would REALLY love to be able to search with real regular expressions. The
loss of wildcards annoys the heck out of me.
--
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/
12:18 p.m.
On Tue, 6 May 2014, Mark J. Blair wrote:
This made me smile. I have a saved search that's
simply the whole Vintage Computing category with a large list of excluded sellers...
including all of the specific ones mentioned by others here! :)
I would sure like to have a permanent blacklist that automatically
applies across all of my searches. I would REALLY love to be able to
search with real regular expressions. The loss of wildcards annoys the
heck out of me.
Don't forget "vintagecomputermuseum" and "newsgroups".
g.
--
Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007
http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind.
http://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll - Go Collimated or Go Home.
Some people collect things for a hobby. Geeks collect hobbies.
ScarletDME - The red hot Data Management Environment
A Multi-Value database for the masses, not the classes.
http://scarlet.deltasoft.com - Get it _today_!
8:59 a.m.
One is Shill bidding has become a way of life with
some sellers. When 90% of there sales are "second chance"
you know something is wrong
Shills are only a minor problem. Ebay catches quite a few of them, and we
sellers see this when bids get cancelled for "administrative reasons", with
no warning or further explanation. Shills are apparently quite easy to
catch, as most of them are dumb and sloppy.
As for second chances, many sellers often have multiples of items, and
second chances are a good way to move out those multiples. This is
especially true for those of us in the surplus business.
--
Will
but ebay doesn't
do anything other than turn it into local law that
have better
things to do.
The other is the clutter of items that are priced beyond anything
that I'd ever pay. Since they can stay there forever, it make searching
for new interesting items a pain.
I just don't look anymore.
I'm sure I'm missing things I want but I just don't have time
to filter through thousands of items I've see for 2 years.
Dwight
> Date: Mon, 5 May 2014 23:19:11 -0700
> From: jws at jwsss.com
> To:
> Subject: Re: Bidding
>
>
> On 5/5/2014 10:44 PM, Mark J. Blair wrote:
> > Now that eBay obscures bidder identity, how can one know that this
certain individual has placed a bid?
The way I
deduce identities is to look at auctions where i'm interested
in an individual. If they win the auction, and leave feedback, i can
get their ID from the feedback.
From there on I go with them as "mr 762" or such where the feedback
count gives them away.
Just go to you list of identities and double check the count.
I don't know who Chuck is referring to, but I know of three people in
the category (and one who doesn't bid on ebay to my knowledge) that can
buy anything they like. I knew the Id's from the counts of a couple of
them as certain things were put up for sale for a while and they
vacuumed them up. I still peruse their buys for pointers to sales.
the sales I don't want to interfere with, but sellers frequently have no
clue of what they are selling. So when someone finds something I'm
interested in I like to look at the things they buy to get ideas for
new search formulas.
A few of the scientific gizmos I like to troll for people don't have any
idea what the proper name is or the description, and I've found a few by
following this strategy.
Jim
10:15 a.m.
In article <BLU178-W413C2B43559CC67171287DA34F0 at phx.gbl>,
dwight <dkelvey at hotmail.com> writes:
Two things I don't like about ebay now.
One is Shill bidding has become a way of life with
some sellers.
So start a blog where you highlight the shills and publicize it widely
in the ebay community.
This list seems obsessed with the topic of "shill bidding", but in the
10+ years of buying things off ebay, I can't recall a single time
where I've been the "victim" of this. <shrug> I don't think
it's as
common as reading the complaints here would lead you to believe.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" free book
<http://tinyurl.com/d3d-pipeline>
The Computer Graphics Museum <http://ComputerGraphicsMuseum.org>
The Terminals Wiki <http://terminals.classiccmp.org>
Legalize Adulthood! (my blog) <http://LegalizeAdulthood.wordpress.com>
8:21 a.m.
On 05/05/2014 10:44 PM, Mark J. Blair wrote:
On May 5, 2014, at 22:24 , Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
He makes it known on one or two forums, generally.
--Chuck
On the other hand, I am aware of one other area
where an early bid by a certain individual pretty much says "don't
bother"--the bidder is a corporate patent attorney for a large company and has bags
of money and what he spends isn't more important than the fact that he wants the item.
Now that eBay obscures bidder identity, how can one know that this certain individual has
placed a bid?
3656
days inactive
3656
days old
16 comments
13 participants
participants (13)
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aek＠bitsavers.org -
bfranchuk＠jetnet.ab.ca -
bpettitx＠comcast.net -
cclist＠sydex.com -
dkelvey＠hotmail.com -
geneb＠deltasoft.com -
glen.slick＠gmail.com -
jws＠jwsss.com -
legalize＠xmission.com -
nf6x＠nf6x.net -
other＠oryx.cc -
teoz＠neo.rr.com -
wdonzelli＠gmail.com