I was given by you the gift of Patience while I installed and later spent a whole lot more time then I thought debugging the new Cricket Snipe engine. In return I give a feature gift that many have been asking for, for a long time.
Cricket will now be able to do bid grouping. Or what I am just
calling a Snipe Group.
There will be a Snipe Group editor. Here you'll find a list of your auctions
that are set and way to name a group and assign auctions to the group. In
addition to a Snipe group you can tell CJ how many of the items in the group you
want to win. This extra feature covers a much larger variety of reasons to use
the group other then to win one item then the group is done.
Reasons to use a Group Snipe
You are looking at several VCR or items that for a variety
of reasons would take any one of the bunch but are focusing on just getting
one. So you have 7 VCR's closing in the next 7 days.
You set a Snipe for each VCR. You use the Snipe Group editor to make a group
and give it a name like VCR. How many VCR's do you want to win?
When the auction first in the group is bid on and CJ wins it checks to see
if you wanted to win more then one and if so, leaves the rest of the snipes
active. If only one, then CJ aborts the remainder of the group.
You have somebody's birthday coming up or a reason to give a gift. You set up several Snipes for a variety of auctions and you give it a name like Suzy's Gift. You choose to win one or more of the items, you are not particularly caring about which gift to give Suzy 'cause you know she is going to like them ALL! So you tell Cricket to bid and keep bidding until X number of these auctions have ended.
I came up with this some years ago but have hesitated to implement it because
there are risks... Over the last few years many customers have asked me for the
feature and finally in 4x I started on it but I was still working on the
business rules... how to minimize and more desirably, eliminate the risk with
this kind of feature.
The risk of course is winning more then one if you only wanted one.. ouch!
Snipe Group Business Rules
3 minute rule.
No Snipe in a group that close within 3 minutes of each other.
There needs to be plenty of time to confirm a win or loss before another
group member can be sniped.
No Bid Robot Only bids
Cricket will not be Sniping so it can't tell if you won or lost.
No Dutch Auctions
Determining a Dutch Auction win is difficult and at this time is best left
to Ebay. In any event the feature for Dutch would be redundant because one
can bid for more then one
If Bid Robot will be bidding with CJ, there can be no group
members together within 8 minutes of an auction end.
Bid Robot can only be cancelled before the last 5 minutes. The extra couple
minutes is more safety buffer.
If Cricket cannot determine a FOR SURE WIN or a FOR SURE
LOSS - the rest of the auctions may be aborted but saved. (I actually have a
better idea and am testing it)
This carried the most risk but with recent changes on Ebay it is just about
impossible to not tell the final status now if the program does end up with
the auction page.
If there are program errors causing an abort for one member
of the group, the rest of the group members will not be affected.
Self explanatory
If there is a problem and the rest of the group members are
aborted but saved, a Group Alert flag will be set and you'll be notified.
Notification means, since Cricket couldn't determine final outcome you may
have to reset the snipes in the group or delete them.
I thought a few days more work, a week at most on the new Snipe engine was all that was going to be needed. I had it in the program beginning with 3.3.5 but until Ebay made the changes I thought they might make I wasn't sure how the changes would affect and change what I had already written.. I knew the concept and technologies were the way to go but how it would finally be implemented I didn't know
Up until that time the engine was only tested on a few of my computers. Not the gambit of computers out there.
Ebay's made the testing difficult, not intentionally as well as the upcoming holidays. Their sign in feature continues to be worked on and it has caused things to work one day then NOT the next. The .7 revision was a perfect example of this. The method used to determine you were signed in because Ebay flip flopped on what called a sign in. Cricket tested for it and didn't know or couldn't know it changed. (Now it can and if for some reason it couldn't it won't matter :) I mentioned once in an email to a lot of users that some of this trouble was probably for the better because Ebay was showing me how to bullet proof the program.
I want to thank the thousands of Cricket users for the extremely kind and supportive emails I have received and for taking the clue a few weeks ago that I could either sit at my computer all day answering emails or get back to work on the program. I received a few emails from frustrated users but they replied back understanding the situation.
I want to thank those that took special notice that I was suffering a bit too right along with all of you and sent me money just because.
When this all started back in November my oldest Son was involved in a serious car accident requiring a life flight to the hospital. As it turned out he was OK for the most part because his seat belt and airbag really saved him. Some surgery to put a rod into his leg as he broke his femur was all there really was that was serious aside from what I am calling the life saving injuries caused by the seat belt, bruises and cracked ribs and some air bag injuries.
I took one day off to go to a dinner party just before Christmas, I worked Christmas eve and day for the testers trying to fix what they were reporting prior to Christmas. I am working now and expect to work tonight, New Years and I will work all day on New Years day if need be.
My oldest Son is out of commission for some months yet so he decided he wanted to fly up and visit his ole dad on January 2. I am going to have to take some time off and spend it with him over the few days he is going to be here.
When is Cricket going to be ready again?
Well.. I tried to get it ready a few weeks ago then the holidays hit and I've lost contact with most of the testers in the last four to five days. I suppose they will be back after the New Years. I am confident enough in the engine that if you are there to make sure all is well it will either snipe consistently for you as it does me, or a bug may pop up that could confuse it and cause it not to bid. The more computers I get it on now, the faster this is going to solve the problems.
I am not going to release the program officially until I know you won't beat me up because I didn't test it enough.
What I need from Cricket customers more then anything right now is your continued support while I get the bugs out of the new Snipe engine and for those that are willing to try out the new Snipe engine to drop me an email and I'll get a link to you.
Is last second bidding or "Sniping" all you need to know about winning more Ebay auctions?
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