Ooh, I like that second idea! For a long time, I've been advocating the first idea (automatic extension), but it does have some drawbacks: - Still requires that e-mail to the person outbid be faster than the time remaining in the auction (a big problem now). - Potential for the "never-ending auction". - Offerer requirements that an auction *must* end by a certain time. As you can tell, I've bee sniped too. <<<John>>>

I personally *hate* the proxy bid idea. At least how it works on eBay. There's not many things as demoralizing than seeing something nifty with a bid of $2.00 on it and someone has put a maximum bid of $50.00 on it. The whole fun of an incremental auction is the small jumps in bidding and that soul-searching question you have to ask yourself each time you're outbid: "Do I really want to go a buck higher on that [insert item here]?" If there's going to be a "maximum" bid, then it should just be a sealed-bid auction, where everyone secretly bids whatever they want to pay and the highest wins, with no bid amounts being disclosed. Unfortunately, if there's something you really want, you have to play by the rules and suffer through it. I try not to "snipe" anyone...it's a karma thing. But I do usually hold my bidding until within a couple of hours before the end of the auction. If the person I outbid in turn outbids me immediately, I take it as a sign that they really want the item and most of the time I'll move along to something else. What I'd love to see is a live auction site, where the auctions for each item don't last more than 10 minutes or so. Descriptions/pictures for the items could be on a separate server a week in advance (like the preview for a real auction) and an item catalog that people could print out. Then the auctions would take place, say, once or at most twice per week in each category. A real-time auction applet (unfortunately excluding the lynx/shell crowd) could then be used to broadcast the current bid and to "raise your paddle" as well. Only one integer broadcasted by the host for the current bid amount, one for the item number, one to indicate the current "round" number, and one sent from the user to raise the bidding paddle. Users could have previously logged in with their username and password and given their paddle and bidder number. Much faster than fifty people hitting reload on a large HTML page filled with graphics, what with only three bytes out and one byte in! The result? A smooth, fast auction where everyone has the chance to bid to their hearts content. Aaron