ePay

On Mon, 26 Oct 1998 david_a._vandenbroucke(a)hud.gov wrote: Well I guess I may as well chime in on this lovely off-topic subject. Yes, I snipe at least 95% of the time. It is the only way to achieve a 70 or 80 % success ratio. Ill-described auctions or stuff out of favor and snipe at the end. I believe Ebay just made a recent change that negated the use of most automated software snipe helpers. I don't know what the scheme was, but somehow the software hooked into Ebay code and made things more certain. Anybody have an idea what this was about? One can still script an auto-dialin with an accurate clock on your own machine or just manually snipe. I have never relied on any automated solution. Sniping is not 100% certain either. It still is possible to submit a bid late, to not be at a useful machine at a key moment, to simply forget, or to be outbid anyway (more of a trend lately). Rather than looking at sniping as a "bug", perhaps it should be considered a "feature". There are scavengers in all ecosystems. I guarantee you the powers at Ebay probably consider sniping to be an asset. If they got rid of it, bid traffic would be 20 or 30% lower and prices overall (complete total) might actually be lower. Perhaps sniping is one of those key reasons why Ebay has grown so large. I have a much longer note in the can on the subject of Ebay, which I am still polishing up and will post in a couple of days. Hopefully I can include enough on topic material within to justify its size. -- Stephen Dauphin