| General > General Technical Chat |
| DateTime: as usual Randall Monroe is clued up |
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| thm_w:
It doesn't really matter with Ebay, the person who bids the highest before the time ends will win. The point of sniping is another bidder won't have time to go back to their computer and type in a new higher number, so anything 5-10s before the end of the auction should be plenty. Its almost better if its on the higher end as if two people bid $100 the earlier bid wins. Sniping services will let you choose a buffer, and recommend an absolute minimum of 3 seconds for network/processing delays. Good services will also submit from multiple servers at the same time. Which tells me ebays server relies on its own internal timekeeping and doesn't care about what timestamp you have on your packet. |
| tggzzz:
--- Quote from: nctnico on December 14, 2023, 09:56:37 pm --- --- Quote from: tggzzz on December 14, 2023, 09:29:45 pm --- --- Quote from: nctnico on December 14, 2023, 09:04:56 pm --- --- Quote from: tggzzz on December 14, 2023, 08:18:50 pm ---I've occasionally wondered how fleabay manages to be "fair" and "accurate" at the end of auctions, especially with sniping from different continents. I've no real way of telling whether it actually does possess those properties. --- End quote --- Is there a rule for auction sites? My guess is that Ebay's software just doesn't care and rounds timestamps to the nearest second. It simply is not a problem. --- End quote --- I haven't noticed a problem, which is a very weak statement. I haven't seen reports of a problem, which is a slightly less weak statement. --- End quote --- Once again you are trying to create a problem which just isn't there. First come up with a legal requirement that states how auctions are supposed to be held timing wise. If that exists, you have a framework you can build a problem definition upon. But if that isn't there, there simply is no problem because there are no requirements. IOW: a problem can not exist without requirements. If you go to Ebay's website and read about auction timing, you'll see they specify the time an auction runs in units of 1 minute. Basically it means whatever works best for Ebay goes. --- End quote --- Once again you are over-interpreting individual words, thus seeing trees and missing the wood under discission. Even trivial experiments using a single browser without using sniping services demonstrate that the granularity of specifying an auction's end is irrelevant to the points being discussed. |
| tggzzz:
--- Quote from: thm_w on December 14, 2023, 10:07:47 pm ---It doesn't really matter with Ebay, the person who bids the highest before the time ends will win. The point of sniping is another bidder won't have time to go back to their computer and type in a new higher number, so anything 5-10s before the end of the auction should be plenty. Its almost better if its on the higher end as if two people bid $100 the earlier bid wins. --- End quote --- That's one reason not to bid a round number. --- Quote ---Sniping services will let you choose a buffer, and recommend an absolute minimum of 3 seconds for network/processing delays. Good services will also submit from multiple servers at the same time. Which tells me ebays server relies on its own internal timekeeping and doesn't care about what timestamp you have on your packet. --- End quote --- That raises the question of how multiple competing sniping services interact. I haven't used a sniping service, so am unaware of the available parameters. Using multiple servers is an obvious optimisation, but I'm not clear about the precise benefits. Using multiple browsers and/or windows pointed at the same auction can show "seconds to go" values differing by up to a second (?or slightly more?). It is unclear to me what happens if you somehow manage to submit a bid when one window shows 0s but another shows 1s. It is also unclear to me what correlation there is or isn't between the "seconds to go" values on different computers, and if/how eBay uses that information. |
| thm_w:
--- Quote from: tggzzz on December 14, 2023, 11:00:08 pm ---I haven't used a sniping service, so am unaware of the available parameters. Using multiple servers is an obvious optimisation, but I'm not clear about the precise benefits. --- End quote --- The benefit is if one server can't connect, power dies, packet gets dropped, packet gets hung up, whatever, then you'll still have another packet that can go through. --- Quote ---Using multiple browsers and/or windows pointed at the same auction can show "seconds to go" values differing by up to a second (?or slightly more?). It is unclear to me what happens if you somehow manage to submit a bid when one window shows 0s but another shows 1s. It is also unclear to me what correlation there is or isn't between the "seconds to go" values on different computers, and if/how eBay uses that information. --- End quote --- If the PC time is off and you submit the bid late, you would just get an error message. After googling I see a lot of complaints that ebay leaves off the ending time in seconds in some places, so the auction might end at :00 or :59 which confuses them. Also there seems to be a recent issue that if your PC time is too fast, it can cause bidding submit problems (so your browser will think the auction has ended when it hasn't). |
| SiliconWizard:
It's all relative. |
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