www.auctionsieve.com

[philby]

Does anybody else experience this behaviour. I have ticked "Hide Items Shown Before".
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Philby

[wickmesh]

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: It's normal behaviour.

The first reason why is when sellers re-list an item that didn't sell, or a good-till-cancelled item rolls over on its 30 day cycle. Ebay assigns it a new item number when this happens - so AS knows no different and assumes it is a new item. GTC items stay in your watch list(s) automatically.

Second reason - purely speculation (Nev will know ), but I think AS has a limit to how many "seen" item numbers it stores. I guess for disc storage, memory usage, searching speed reasons - it must take a lot of computing to check each item number against a list when a sieve gets say 10,000 results. Once the item number gets pushed off the bottom of AS's list, it appears as a new item next time it's searched for...

It's a little frustrating, but I'd say 50% of my daily AS sieve results are things I've seen before. My way to get round this is through use of the ebay lists facility - BIN items get watched in a list relevant to the item, so I can quickly close the firefox tab if I'm already watching an item on ebay. I have lists for "Don't want, DVDs bought" etc. If I click on "all lists" on ebay, I'm currently watching 2044 items

[philby]

OK, many thanks for the explanation
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Regards
Philby

[nev]

Yeah, what he said

The item gets a new id as far as I'm aware. This is the case if you try to view the old item id and you see "This listing has ended. The seller has relisted this item or one like this." That's only possible if the item id has changed.

Are there perhaps other cases where the id is re-used?

AuctionSieve stores the item ids for 30 days.

Hmmm, looking at the code, there's the possibility of this happening (assuming item ids can be re-used):

28 days ago
id1 was retrieved

If id1 is retrieved again now, it's already in the list so it doesn't add it again.
But that means, after 2 days, the id will drop off the list, even though it appeared in results 2 days ago. Ie I don't store the most recent time it was seen. I wonder if changing that would help.

[philby]

Nope, that aint it gentlemen.

Example. Viewed an item on Sunday. It had 3 days to go. Viewed it again today, and it has TWO days to go. Same ItemID. Not a relisting issue.
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Regards
Philby