www.auctionsieve.com

[ClippersChris2013]

Hello everyone. I have noticed a problem with AuctionSieve that may need to be addressed by an update. But, I first want to see if any of you have experienced the same issue I'm experiencing. Basically, I've begun to experience delays with my sieves in which the search within the sieve will get stuck or be delayed for long periods of time on each list of keyword searches. I'll try my best to describe the issue below.

As an example, I have a sieve that has 50 separate searches. When I activate the sieve by clicking "Get auctions!", the first search within the Sieve will begin as normal and the number of eBay search results will display on the Sieve tab along with the progress of the search (i.e. 50/1000). However, as the search progresses, the number eBay search results (in this example, the number is 1000), will begin to increase continuously as the first number approaches the second number.

I feel this may be a result of eBay potentially repeating search results as AuctionSieve clicks through the pages of eBay search results. Because I cannot see the pages of eBay search results that AuctionSieve is sorting through the same way a user could see the search results on the eBay site through a browser, I cannot personally validate this theory. But, it would be reasonable to come to this conclusion since the actual "Sieve results" do not increase any further as the number of eBay search results displayed in the tab increase past the initial amount shown.

In my example, that means once the results displayed on the tab reaches "(950/1000)", the second number will begin to increase and the first number fails to catch up until the second number increases several dozen times. I just did a search where the last number started around 1300 and increased until it hit around 9000, at which time, the first number finally caught up and allowed the second search within the Sieve to finally begin. Note again, that the "Sieve results" did not increase during that span between 1300 and 9000.

With all of that said, I would like to recommend of simple solution of adding a "Skip" feature in the form of a button that will allow an AuctionSieve user to skip to the next search in the sieve assuming that there isn't another way to prevent the issue above from happening. That way, a user will have direct control in the event that there is a delay like described above.

Does anyone have any thoughts or experience with what I have described? Please let me know. Thanks!

[nev]

Hi Chris,

One thing to consider - different searches may end up with similar results and ActionSieve consolidates those together.

Eg
Search 1 results in item 7, item 88, item 55, etc
Search 2 results in item 9, item 88, item 55, etc

Only item 9 will be added to the results when the second search is running because it already has item 88 and 55. So while it's getting 50 results per page, it may only be adding some of those items to the results. Also, the number won't go up if you have any result filters being applied.

One way to test this would be to create a sieve with just the search that seems to be exhibiting the issue.

There is one other possibility - that eBay have some new page designs - when I was implementing the fixes for the last update I saw some radically different pages which AuctionSieve had no hope of understanding with the current code.

[wickmesh]

I can't see how to reply to the poll - but yes, me too.

Multiple possible reasons in my opinion:

* The previously reported (and still outstanding) issue with some searches downloading many less results than they should

This creates a long pause while no new results are added to the sieve. As Nev suggests, "create a sieve with just the search that seems to be exhibiting the issue" to test if this is the problem.


* AS can miss when the actual search results end

What you describe (the second number increasing) is as if AS has found more pages on ebay than ebay initally offered as results for your search. I know that AS does not always pick up on when the actual results have ended - and "Results matching fewer words", "Items from international sellers" etc are often treated as legitimate search results by AS - thus these pages of extra junk get added onto the end of each search, and may be the cause of the second number increasing that you are seeing. (I suspect AS also misses "Sponsored" items and when ebay ""helpfully"" changes your search for you - e.g. moving from a category to the whole of ebay because it finds only a few results).

This was reported quite a while ago and is also still an unresolved problem - but ebay might be making it difficult for Nev to fix. As such, my sieves are full of junk results and it's a problem that I just have to live with in order to use AS. (A question directly for you Chris - do you find your sieve results full of junk?)


* For me, some sieves just stop completely

Sometimes, a sieve (usually a particular large sieve) just stops partway through the run and no more results are downloaded; it will sit with the progress at (say) 200 of 500 pages downloaded, the red stop button visible (not completed and not gone to the green "Get auctions!") but no more pages being downloaded. Stopping and repeating the sieve a few minutes later seems to solve this.


* Ebay DoS protection/traffic management appears to be getting yet more stringent (which might be causing pauses/delays)

(Ebay's DoS protection has caused issues before.)

- I get error messages every few days saying something along the lines of ebay returned error (500?), ebay closed your connection, ebay returned no data for search [...] (etc). I pretty sure AS will retry the particular page of search results when it has an issue (3 times? from memory from the old the whackamole error issue) but whether AS retries the search when you click OK or just skips to the next I'm not sure. Repeating the sieve a few minutes later seems to solve this.

- I'm noticing more and more captchas when browsing the site directly (particuarly when clicking through feedback on a business seller in order to get to "classic view" and then the link for "view items for sale" - as this is now the only way to see a business seller's items in a list that you can easily sort by price etc). [I've had enough of flying tigers and dogs wearing sunglasses, thank you ebay.] (Captcha has been an issue elsewhere too.)

- After a while of loading my sieve results into ebay to view them, I get a screen flash up "Checking your browser before you access ebay" before the item listing loads. This looks a bit like a cloudflare message (I know ebay have used Akamai in the past). The page is titled "Pardon our interruption..." and an example URL is https://www.ebay.co.uk/splashui/challenge?ap=1&appName=orch&ru=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.co.uk%2Fitm%2F116619504621&iid=3c9b85bd-ee0e-4a20-8022-dc93a062a5a4&iim=hODIuMTH&iia=KdkuMTY1ry&iiz=EkILjEyMA**RGU

(An aside - but this might be the cause of this new issue with the watchlist.)


I use ebay.co.uk.