www.auctionsieve.com

nev

AS currently doesn't get *any* results.

After investigating, it appears eBay are doing some sort of browser check.
ie one of those things where you go to a website and you get a page that says something like "Checking your browser" and then after a few seconds it redirects to the website.

I'm not sure I'll be able to come up with a fix for this one... Sad

pac_71 · AuctionSieve regular Joined: 22 Oct 2010 Posts: 10

Crazy idea 47262.

Perhaps you could make a browsers extension that takes and post search URLs from AuctionSeive and posts them via the browser and then parses the results back into the AuctionSeive database. I don't know enough about extensions to know if the limitations would allow such shenanigans as POSTs and local data manipulation.

I got inspired by my work around today, manually hacking eBay search URLs.

wickmesh · Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2025 6:17 am Post subject:

Came here to say this... but it's already been said.

The ens**tification of ebay continues!

My thought is to tie into ebay's API (as was the intention many years ago) instead of scraping html pages - but I appreciate that's a lot of work.

ray8735 · AuctionSieve regular Joined: 16 Feb 2015 Posts: 20

ray8735 · AuctionSieve regular Joined: 16 Feb 2015 Posts: 20

I'm trying AS from time to time and it seems that the first page of results does come through although it's often zero because repeat items are filtered. So I do get a page of results for new Buy It Now items. Is eBay simply waiting for some sort of handshake?

nev · Posted: Sat Aug 16, 2025 2:48 am Post subject:

Hi everyone,

I'm still looking into this.

An interesting thing is that regular eBay users are also encountering this - ie they're just using eBay in their browser and sometimes get these "checking your browser" messages and can't proceed!

So that gives me hope that maybe eBay have been overzealous with this check and they will relax it a bit with a code change on their end.

wickmesh · Posted: Sat Aug 16, 2025 8:51 am Post subject:

nev · Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2025 6:01 am Post subject:

Ok, new beta is out!
Let me know if it fixes things.

I ended up replicating all the various cookies that get sent from a real browser when communicating with eBay and narrowed it down to a few that are necessary (and some other headers).

They may be tied to my computer so I'm not sure if this is going to work in the long run. They may not even work as is. So it's crucial as many of you let me know if it works or not.

The cookies have an expiry date of February 2026 so I may need to issue an update when they change.

wickmesh · Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2025 11:11 am Post subject:

Bad news unfortunately Nev. It does something now - but it's not working properly or usably.

Yes it does get some results - but it's very easy to trigger ebay's protection - even launching one sieve at a time (and waiting for that sieve to complete before launching the next) the point is soon reached where no results are downloaded.

When I come back and try again, sometimes it works OK for a bit, sometimes I get only a single page of results before the protection kicks back in, sometimes I've had to wait an hour or so before any more results can be downloaded.

Bigger searches within individual sieves also trigger this protection and don't complete (one failed at 1400 of 3800 results) with the "ebay is returning error pages or pages I can't intepret [...]" dialog box. Clicking "yes" gives the same error, "no" is a speedrun through the rest of the searches in the sieve with no more results.

What results I do get can be added to the AS watchlist and can be selected/viewed in my browser OK as before. More results in the watchlist update with seller and bids information than before, but this update stops as soon as the protection kicks in. (Maybe this AS watchlist automatic information refresh contributes to the problem and should be disabled?)

Maybe there needs to be a randomised significant time delay (10-20 seconds?) between each page request? (Setting AS going and coming back to it 15 minutes later would be better than where it is now...)

Also - I get a new auction result sometimes on sieves where I've put in a maxmum price on a search, saying (for example) "Under £15.00Remove filter". This result shows no item number in the watchlist. EDIT - it's not just price filters - I've just got a "32 GB - apply Shop by Total Capacity filter".

nev · Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2025 2:56 pm Post subject:

Do you run more than one sieve at a time? (ie retrieve items for multiple sieves at the same time)

wickmesh · Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2025 8:27 pm Post subject:

ray8735 · AuctionSieve regular Joined: 16 Feb 2015 Posts: 20

Just to report similar experience. I've tried 3.2.2 once each day and this morning I got 97% of my first sieve. I checked the forum at this point before proceeding further. My other sieves returned 0 results and I then loaded the beta version but this also gave zero results. I'll try again tomorrow when I next restart the PC. Definitely worth persevering.

nev · Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2025 7:14 am Post subject:

There may also be some eBay page changes.
I made some fixes along those lines.

Can you run a sieve and then when it fails, go to this folder:
On a mac: Library/Application Support/AuctionSieve/tmp
On windows: /Users/you/AppData/Roaming/AuctionSieve/tmp

Grab the two most recent files, like
lastpage23.html and lastpage22.html

Zip them up and send them to me.

wickmesh · Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2025 10:50 am Post subject:

Just acknowledging I've seen this Nev - I will do so when I can but currently I'm packing to go to a music festival where there will be near-zero mobile signal, so it might take me until next week to sort this... sorry.

nev · Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2025 11:26 am Post subject:

All good. Thanks!