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Welcome to eBay -- The World's Online Fun and Games Place
31 August 2003 / Sunday - eBay, nominally open 24/7 for seemingly increasing numbers of low IQ bidders from around the world to spend their money (if they ever send it after they win!), and to fleece sellers out of the little money they have for little-earned commissions and miscellaneous charges for just about everything even though some of them don't work half the time, has a nasty habit of slowing down its web site by experimenting with wunderbar new formats, adding so-called necessary features that they say everybody asked for but that nobody I know likes for some strange reason -- it's almost like Shrub beating the war drums with all that WMD shit, and then nobody can find any after months of diligently looking for them by hundreds of experts! Maybe it's the same big desert that is eBay?
Oh, yes, eBay did have a couple hours outage on curiously the same day that the Sobig worm stated proliferating -- they blame it on a switch from generator power at a single one of their several back-up servers over to line power, something that I don't see the logic in, but hey, they should know -- who am I to question their first hand official public statements. Just what are their back-ups backing up, anyway? The cooked books of their financial statements?
Early on Saturday, 30 August 2003
I went to eBay to get some links for something I am doing and discovered
that the main page was sort of weird -- I was awake enough to
remember to take screen shots -- is this their new EASY FIND FOR MORONS page? 
It seems simple enough for at least most of some of the bidders I have been getting lately -- you know, the ones who aren't the brightest crayon in the box! Curiously, I had also gotten yet simpler screens earlier, not even having the eBay logo at the top left, but, as sometimes happens I was so amazed that it didn't occur to me to take a screen shot at that moment -- as cool, calculating and level-headed as I think I usually am! Honest, I'll try to do better, I promise!
Hey, if this was their default page, and the SEARCH included everything on all of their international sites which is available to the USA, as well as everything listed in everybody's eBay stores, then it might be extremely worthwhile -- as it now stands, if you have a store with 500 items listed, they would never show up in a normal search UNLESS you clicked on that seller's store link, although on the Spanish eBay boards they say that Giggle picks them up -- otherwise, since very few browsing cows even bother to even look at what other items a seller is offering, all of the store items are simply languishing in cyber space -- no wonder they only charge a couple cents to list the things there -- that's more moola in eBay's pockets and less in the ever-trusting seller's, a lot of whom are living day to day on whatever their items are selling for -- IF they sell!!
It isn't surprising that PayPal is closing their stores -- unless eBay starts actively linking store items with the general search option, these might become less used by sellers who find that 99.9% of their store items are never sold while they continue to pay the listing fees every 30 days, as small as they might be. Didn't Benjamin Franklin once say, A penny saved is a penny earned? Well in the case of these stores, eBay is earning quite a few pennies/listing and not doing a single positive thing to get them, as usual!
I tried to click on the few active
links on the above page and this screen popped up for each and every one of them 
Yuppers, just as informative as doing a Giggle search and getting 50 full pages of useless links!
OK, so it was just one of those momentary lapses on eBays part -- I am sure they will tell us all that they have everything under control and that they are sorry for the inconvenience -- if they even bother to acknowledge the obvious facts! I let it ride and sent the screen shot links to some of my eBay pals and to TheAuction Guild for their eBay documentation files -- they are the publishers of that fabulous TAGNotes newsletter which keeps tabs on and analyzes the activities of various online auctions, including eBay.
Then on Sunday, 31 August 2003, at 06:36h, just for the hell of it, I logged onto eBays main page again and found yet another dumb variation
-- this
one almost seemed normal, and the couple links I tried did take
me to an actual page of some kind, and I assume that the links
on those pages worked.
It was curious -- when I found this new variation a friend from MN was IMing me and I asked her to go look at this new mutant -- she did, but said she got the normal screen! OK, she is using a PC and I use a Mac -- do I have a magical TiBook laptop, or what? Am I the only one who sees these things? hmmmmm -- lucky me, maybe! Or maybe the page she got was cached in her puter memory? I very frequently delete all the cookies in my cache, as well as anything else in there, which might explain things, maybe?
Incidently, check sometime to see just how many cookies you get logging onto the Spanish eBay site as compared to doing the same thing on the USA eBay site -- AMAZING! I have to remember to take screen shots of both caches the next time I experiment!
I shall attempt to update this info page as time permits. The NeXT addition may be something about the hundreds of automatically generated emails that constantly fill up my eBay screen name mailbox -- and they are NOT due to my eBay handle being the same as my screen name! 99% of them are cloned by the lingering effects of the Sobig and related worms, and apparently the problem will not disappear until sometime in September, when that nasty critter was programmed to cease to exist -- that is, unless eBay secures their servers just a tad! I wonder how their shareholders would react if they knew? And why did their stock price soar following the outage -- some kind of insider adjustment just to make things look good?
1 September 2003 / Monday
- OK, just to check to see what eBays main
page was like, at 00.05h, I found that it was the exact same as
the first one I have above, the EASY FIND FOR MORONS version
-- so I clicked on the sign-in link just
to see where it might randomly take me, and after entering my
usual data, got the following error page 
-- so much for being able to do
anything on eBay had I to be a casual user and wanted to check out
what I might like to bid on!
Then I went to the screen name I use for
eBay -- there were 237 emails sitting
there waiting for my attention -- and that is since yesterday afternoon when I dumped all the worm-generated replies in the
trash! 
-- of the
237 emails, only
4 had to do with my items! This was NOT
eBays fault though -- it was the fault of all the servers
that sent these automated notices out due to the Sobig Worm, so they only made the problem a lot worse than
it really was!
Compare that to what almost anybody who
has a web site and uses the mail forwarding feature
gets for pure and simple spam, NOT the worm-related
kind -- I unfortunately used mail forwarding for
my main web site, and just allow the 1000 spams
to sit in that screen name mailbox -- when I delete them all,
the mailbox is full within 2 days again, so why bother -- here is a representative
part of the current 1000 emails in that mailbox -- 
-- and even with the couple dozen
email addresses I already have on the filter, they easily enough
change a letter or whatever in the email sender address and get
through again -- notice that there is possibly a single
worm-related email in the bunch, the one that says Delivery Status
Notification (Failure)! That web site is
on a UNIX server, and they are theoretically immune to that
worm attack for some techy reason -- it was only a Microsoft-related
event, as usual!
I also found it quite interesting that an uncle and cousin, each in a different state, have been getting tons of worm-related emails in their eBay screen name mailboxes -- the curious thing is that their eBay handle is NOT their screen name! eBay is seemingly making a big deal about changing an old handle/screen name to something else, specifically to avoid these so-called spams -- they changed and are seemingly getting just as many or more under their new user name!
They use PCs -- some time ago they installed FireWall software on their respective computers, both of which are connected to a fast cable modem -- I find it strange that once the worm thing started, my uncle said that he was getting 1 or 2 wormy emails per second trying to get through his firewall! Unless my logic is failing me, the only place they could have originated is somewhere on the eBay servers and databases -- they do not have their screen name as their user name, but their email address is in the eBay data stashes somewhere, probably in some cgi file/s -- just how secure are these files -- or those of any other server, for that matter?
26 October 2003 / Sunday - DAMN! eBay continues their dumb experiments while their paying sellers are trying to sell stuff! No wonder things are not selling and/or the prices for the few things that do sell are bargain basement bids -- from those bidders who can actually bid without finding glitch after glitch to contend with!
It is absolutely inconceivable that on some days EACH AND EVERY winning bid is from the same ISP -- it suggests to my freely roving mind that certain web addresses are unable to even bid because of all this eBay experimentation crap.
I found a couple new main screens since I started this page, and when I clicked on SEARCH it disconnected me from AOL, simply meaning that it was somehow in eBays faulty programming -- how anybody can sell anything at all is beyond me -- even if they do this shit in the early hours of the morning, there are bidders from Europe and elsewhere who are probably trying to see stuff selling on this side of the world and all they get are nonsense screens??
Here are some variations noted since 10 October
-- 
-- another
MORONS screen --
-- now this one
is a real hum dinger! Notice that even the title of the page is changed,
no main page links were found, and the eBay logo
is only half there -- showing how half-assed their nerdy well-paid programmers are!
-- another, fuller
variation on the half-assed
theme format!
Not only is the general eBay program so overly bloated already with new categories and sub-sub categories, routines and subroutines, they unilaterally decided that sellers now have to complete additional forms and pages to list something! Now you have to fill-in all kinds of basically useless shit when you list an art work -- ALL of which should be included in any good item description to begin with!
How about the entirely new screen for book
sellers? -- 
-- what
a fuckin waste of time! Now the really
lazy sellers can get an already made item
description made by God knows who, just by plugging in an ISBN number!
Add to that, the totally
redundant waste of time having to fill
in the fabulous ITEM
SPECIFIC crap -- 
-- which should already be in the
sellers description!
And don't you just love those freekin pop
ups that appear when you go from the main page to anywhere else
on the eBay site? Like the viewer logged on just to buy a GD sofa
-- 
-- or anything
else they want to gratuitously throw at them! I know that I don't!
Does anybody remember when selling was just a screen or two to fill out? And we actually sold loads of stuff that way -- wasn't that the object of the game? Now there are 5, 6, 7 and more screens just to do the same thing, and sales SUCK, royally! Thank you eBay for caring so much about your $$paying$$ users -- and caring a LOT more about your stock market value, which always seem to be on the upswing. Who the hell would ever want to invest their hard-earned money in your stock if they don't get a cent in quarterly dividends? Certain employees ARE raking it in when they sell their stock options, though -- who cares if anything sells just as long as they keep paying through the nose for fees and commissions, not only to list, but also for pic services, PayPal commissions and whatever else they can try to hook the seller with, as cheap as it might appear -- they get more while the paying-through-the-nose seller gets l e s s all the time -- and has to waste loads more time to list a series of items than before! At least it keeps their geeky programmers on the payroll, which does help to keep the national unemployment figures nominally higher than they might otherwise be!
Spanish eBay sellers/users have a very simplified set of options to work with, and the listing process is a lot faster -- their categories are more in line with what they are used to buying/selling, in general, some of which might not be of interest outside of Spain -- if they have a store they cannot list for 30 days, as we can here in the USA (unless they list it through the US store page) -- BUT they also pay less than we do to list stuff, are newer at it, have a lot more users with ZERO feedback, and have to contend with MANY MORE non-paying deadbeat winners than we do.
This is also compounded by the fact that
there are way fewer home computers in Spain (and in the schools)
than there are in some other countries, and it costs a lot more
just to be online there -- meaning that they are not on
the Internet for dozens of hours/day as some of us are here. Some
of them sell on other eBay sites, French, English and American and probably do better than they would on their own
national site -- and pay
more in the process, but at least they
sell more -- which, once again, is
the object of the game. Some of their item
descriptions might be a little lacking in item details and payment options,
but they do have a lot of very interesting things
to sell, many of which are not found anywhere else -- AND, at a reasonable price! -- 
I sometimes list some of my stuff on eBay Spain, but only certain things seem to sell there -- others which do very well on the USA site don't even get a bid there, simply because they have an entirely different tradition in terms of interests, passtimes and collecting, perhaps compounded by their long-time relative isolation under the Franco regime, which ended while I was studying and teaching there. All of that has changed now, and they are now part of the European Economic Community, use the Euro, but they are still just a tad different than some other cultures -- which is part of their total charm and exquisite taste in many things -- they really know how to positively spend their leisure time, something that Americans seem to largely neglect -- I was able to develop myself as a person more when I was there than I ever could here. If I had a really free choice by becomming unattached to a few important things which tie me down here, I would prefer living there than here in the States, for many reasons -- and if I live long enough, I hope to exercise this option as soon as I am able to. ¡ARRIBA ESPAÑA!
27 October 2003 / Monday -- NOTE -- Maybe I should add that the above screen shots were taken from the AOL browser screens, after clearing out all the cookies in my cache and logging on to eBay by typing in ebay.com in the URL space -- most people never bother deleting all the cookies on their computer, which can and does affect their online experience in many ways --
Because sometimes different browsers view things differently, I now did some experiments using the Netscape browser, which I rarely use, and the results were similar to what I have above.
In this instance I got the MORONS
screen, but with all kinds of text where there were blank spaces
in some of the above examples -- 
-- and when I clicked the upper HOME link,
I was amazingly brought to a more
normal appearing main eBay page
-- 
-- notice
that the page seems to have been redirected to a slightly different
URL, one having pages before the ebay.com part --
this may be normal, but is something that I haven't really analyzed
in the past.
Oh, well, the eBay saga continues -- a smart ass poster on one of the Spanish eBay foros = message boards, said that my item descriptions look like Mexican busses, with way too many distracting colors and all!! He obviously doesn't like some Mexican things, but that is something else I could analyze in some depth, but choose not to. Some people have told me in the past that I go overboard with my attention attracting artifacts, including different color letters, and changed fonts, and my frequent use of animated gifs. I did it in the same conceptual way that just about any commercial advertising is done -- to grab the attention of the viewer and hopefully sell more -- and we wouldn't get a lot of the sometimes bulky colorful fliers in the daily newspapers if the results weren't positive -- big business wouldn't spend all those ad buckies if it didn't work.
What I did do, as a trial, in my last batch of ebay treasures is change most of my text to black and used a single font, the default, which means that each item viewer would see my pages according to how he/she set up the font preferences in their browser. Although I generally knew that changing font characteristics in the item descriptions increases the amount of html and, thus, adds to the size of the page file, but did not know just how much -- this led to some interesting new observations. In the following table you will see how the page file size varied in five different items WITH all my usual color and font changing vs. having the major text parts simply in one font style/size/color --
|
My Item File # |
Kb Size with colors, etc. |
Kb Size black |
|
g341 |
28.886 |
21.711 |
|
g345 |
28.216 |
21.168 |
|
g347 |
26.445 |
20.234 |
|
g348 |
28.063 |
20.856 |
|
g098 |
26.471 |
21.763 |
The individual page file sizes are significantly reduced -- I do not know if I shall continue doing this -- it may depend on whether my sales increase or decrease because of it (which would be hard to accurately determine, anyway) -- it goes against my personal ideas about what ads should be like to be the most effective, but I guess we shall have to wait for some comparative results. It does leave me a lot of room to do more in my item descriptions if I wanted to, since eBay has a limit on the file size allowed in item descriptions.
25 November 2003 / Tuesday
-- Didn't eBay say they would
hold off any experimentation until after the Holidays buying
spree? Well, it seems they are still doing the same old shit,
now trying out an entirely new home screen for AOL users! -- 
-- that
is all that shows up, and notice the dumbass URL change -- NONE of the links worked, and if I try them, AOL shuts
down! -- for two weeks already I try to add new items using the
AOL browser and after the first one gets listed, AOL craps out
on me for NO reason and I have to reboot, which suggests that
they messed up the code used by AOL or that
theirs is incompatible! I then have to switch to using the Netscape
browser, which I rarely use, and can then get the rest of my usual
lot of 10 items listed without a glitych. Bidding and final
sales are dismally slow -- no wonder -- nobody can do anything
with the mess their coding is in -- EXAMPLE:
on the Spanish eBay site, as in all of their wonderful national sites,
there are many different pages having a SEARCH
(BUSCAR) thingy -- I tried searching for DOMINIO
(= domain name -- simply because I have a couple listed for the first
time) on several different ebaySpain pages and
got 4 out of the 7 actually listed at that time, the 7, or NOT A SINGLE ONE! How the fuck can anybody bid on something if they
can't even find the freekin thing using the SEARCH
option?
And I completely stopped even worrying about that dumbass book item exclusive crap -- all that and loads more is already in my item description, and if anybody wants to find it, all they have to do is read, something that the average eBay user apparently didn't do too well at in school!
What I did early this morning is put a batch of things once again on YardSaleNet, which is totally FREE -- and in each of the items are several links to my eBay goodies and my own web sites -- their no-holds-barred policy means that you could sell your unwashed panties or your kids if you wanted to! Whether one actually sells anything there or not is subordinate to the advertizing potential by listing there -- it has brought me bidders to my eBay listings in the past -- PLUS my eBay listing link is also featured on at least 50 of my minor domain home pages, so I really feel sorry for all the normal eBay seller peeps who only depend on eButt to promote their items! WHAT A LAUGH!
6 December 2003 / Saturday
-- Those MFSOABs!! I just
used my standard bookmarked link to get to my auctons, and got
an error message -- 
-- what
does this mean? That any
and all of the general auction list links
which I provide on each of my listed items now shows up as an
error message! They changed the freekin URL! When I clicked on
SEARCH, I was able to find the new URL -- 
-- wonderful! [you can compare the URLs in the upper part of
the pics] So I now have 63 items listed with
the old URL -- not really a major problem to undo their wondeful
job of not messing with things during the Holidays -- at
least on anything new, which includes auction listings and all of
the several email footers I use for my eBay winners!
Thank you, once again, eBay for making the
seller experience as simple and straight forward as usual! You
MFSOABs!! Boy, am I glad I got this domain -- it seems as
if it is going to be extremely useful just for eBay shit!
I shall probably add some stuff about deadbeats, on another page/s, when I have time -- I already
have a file full of stuff just screaming to get itself online!
What I find very strange about the URL change, is that ALL of the bookmarks I have for some of my favorite sellers remained the same -- they weren't changed for some weird reason!
9 December 2003 / Tuesday
-- Oh, well, now I don't feel so picked on! I
just tried some links to pals' seller lists and 10 out of 13
did not function and gave me that really kewl ERROR message --
-- notice how it suggests
that I did something wrong, as usual! Hey, they
all worked on the 6th! Nothing wrong with my browser! So one now has to
redo all of the old bookmarks to find what they tell us is a better
one for our own security?? They have their heads up their ass! Many sellers probably use their bookmarked URL in
their item descriptions and in their personalized eBay winner emails, as I always have done -- now they have
to change everything -- it is sort of funny because I sure as
hell don't feel any more secure with eBay lately!
hmmmmm BUT, they can always be sure to collect the fees and commissions,
can't they -- although the November
payment seems to be getting posted a tad
later than normal, for some reason -- I keep getting my old balance
on the items I listed yesterday, and that is 8 days into the new
billing cycle! Maybe last month was a totally
free listing month?? Should I hold my breath
to find out?
[stay tuned for more purely personal eBay views and observations -- make your own judgments concerning their potential validity]
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