JBidwatcher Frequently Asked Questions
- Why aren't you responding to my email? Is JBidwatcher still supported?
- How do I get items into JBidwatcher from Safari?
- What means, if my eBay name (in the right top corner) is cancelled?
- I'm having sign-in problems...
- I've recently lost all visibility to my auctions. Under the 'current' tab I can't see anything, and under the 'complete' tab, I can see the time/date listed in the left column but that's it.
- How do I look at JBidwatcher's error logs?
- I received an 'unknown error' bidding or sniping on an item? What happened?
- Where is the context menu? I cannot find it.
- How do I change my snipe amount?
- I'm getting a CAPTCHA (a small graphic with words, letters, or numbers on a complex background) prompt whenever I log in to eBay through my web broswer. Will JBidwatcher still work? What can I do to make it go away?
- Do i have to synchronize the Time manually? Or what have i to do, if the PC-time is different from the eBay-Time?
- Is there another way to get the old auctions saved to an external file for reference so I can clean out my completed auction files?
- Does JBidwatcher support multiple eBay users or if not, if I can run two sessions one with each user?
- Any way to get JBidwatcher working with fedora core 6's version of Java?
- In Windows, it is hard to read the amount of the bid when the item is highlighted/selected with the dark blue back-colour. I don't know if this is just inherited from the Windows colour scheme or if it can be configured somehow.
- how does it calculate what my shipping costs would be if the seller has one of those "enter your zip code to calculate your shipping costs..."?
- Can you explain "auto-subtract shipping and insurance (p/p)" in the sniping box?
- We get a "not logged in...." The reason is "read timed out" Will snipe work?
- Hi, I was just wondering if I needed my IE (or Firefox or Opera) window open when the program is working.
- Would it be very difficult for you to implement in a future version something like "custom folders" i.e. groups in which one can sort his auctions and which possibly can be given custom names? (for example "furniture", "paintings", "toys" etc.)
- JBidwatcher won't run under (recent version of Linux). I'm running the following version of java
$ java --version
java version "1.4.2"
gij (GNU libgcj) version 4.1.1 20060525 (Red Hat 4.1.1-1) - I lost a bid today, because I restarted my computer this AM and didn't realize that jbidwatcher would not load and start on it's own. That is, I have to click on the icon to activate it. Is there a way (such as in the start up menu) that I can get it to run automatically when the computer starts?
- I was looking for something in JBidwatcher and changed the display of the appearing 'window', the icon 'basket' etc. vanished, how can I reactivate them?
- I'm seeing the red cancelled eye is inserted on all positions. What's wrong?
- My HD of my Mac crashed. Now my list of "complete" is lost and my access data. Can you tell me where I can find the corresponding files in Mac OS X?
- I get errors like this in my log file / in the Console view under OS X when I try to launch JBidwatcher:
What does it mean, and how can I fix it?Thu Sep 07 18:41:18 CEST 2006: JBidWatcher: java.lang.ClassCastException: Currency cannot compareTo different currencies! Cannot compare different currencies. java.lang.ClassCastException: Currency cannot compareTo different currencies! Cannot compare different currencies.
at Currency.compareTo(Currency.java:610)
at BaseTransformation.compareCurrency(BaseTransformation.java:194)
at BaseTransformation.compareByClass(BaseTransformation.java:165)
at auctionTableModel.compare(auctionTableModel.java:453) - If I have a snipe set on an auction, do I have to leave my computer on with JBidwatcher running for this to work?
- I was wondering if it would be possible to have a converted currency tab in it? (I would like to know the amound in Euro's).
- Might I suggest a small change for the next version? Change the highlight colour for the currently selected item
- JBidwatcher is a great program, and really useful! Why don't you charge money for it?
- If here are no bids, will program still work and bid opening bid for me? Or, if I already have highest bid, will it just let it go and not bid up, so I will win?
- On the Current column some of the prices are listed with (0) and some are listed with (FP). What is FP?
- Is there any way to see the s&h on the main screen? Ideally I would like to see the total of the current price and the s&h added together.
- I just can't find a way of displaying the high bidder in the selling tab.
- I assumed that the bidding would just take care of itself, that everytime I got outbid, the auto-snipe feature would bid for me AND snipe.
- What is the shortest time to snipe a bid?
- It would be nice to either be able to turn off the "tooltip" pictures
- Is it possible to bring up an item on eBay by clicking on the number in JBidWatcher?
- Browser detection and launching always uses 'Netscape' on platforms other than Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. Specifically under OS/2 (eComstation or eCS) it always tries to launch 'netscape'.
- What about browser detection for IRIX, FreeBSD, etc...?
- I want to optimize my snipe time; how can I get JBidwatcher to do that? How does JBidwatcher deal with potential network delays? What are the recommended snipe times (seconds before auction ending) to set for different kinds of connections? (Cable, DSL, etc.)
- How come I only get a file of about 1200 bytes. When I try to use the jar or to untar the gz file, I get messages indicating that the file is corrupt or wrong format?
- How do I back up my JBidwatcher data?
- Are there any other FAQs?
- A. I am unfortunately very busy, both with work, and other independant
projects (that I hope may someday be the next JBidwatcher). It takes
me around 5-10 minutes per email to respond, and I get enough that I
wouldn't have the time to spend with my wife, much less other
projects, were I to respond to all of them.
I read every email, and I really try to respond to as many as I can,
but sometimes a week goes by where I just don't have the chance, and
then I'm behind by an unresolvable amount. At that point my only
reasonable option is to let things fall on the floor.
JBidwatcher is definitely still being supported. If I ever choose not
to, that will be front-and-center in big letters on the JBidwatcher
home page. Also, if I ever do decide to stop, the first thing I'll do
is try to see if anyone else is interested in maintaining it.
I don't see me stopping JBidwatcher any time soon, though. In fact,
I'm actually working on the 'next version' of JBidwatcher, with a
changed UI, and lots of advanced features. - A. If you are viewing the item, the address bar generally has a favicon at
the leftmost part of the address bar. Drag that to JBidwatcher, and drop
it, and it should add fine. - A. If your eBay name has a '
strikethrough' over it, it means
JBidwatcher is having trouble logging in as you, and it means that a snipe
on your behalf might not fire. You should hover your cursor over the
strikeout, and a tooltip should pop up and let you know what it thinks is wrong. - A. If you're having sign-in problems, the most likely issue is eBay putting up a
captcha, in which case you need to actually stop using JBidwatcher for a day or
so, log in normally (through your browser) and let eBay's security system relax
about your account.
If you're running Windows, it may be a different kind of security failure.
First, upgrade your version of Java by going here:
http://java.sun.com/getjava
and install that. It may help, especially if you're seeing something about SSL or certificates. - A. The way to resolve this under Mac OS X (where it seems to happen more than other platforms) is as follows:
- Shut down JBidwatcher.
- Bring up Terminal (it's usually in Applications/Utilities)
- Type:
rm ~/.jbidwatcher/display.cfg
If that gives an error, your display configuration has probably moved. Try:
rm ~/Library/Preferences/JBidwatcher/display.cfg - Now start JBidwatcher again.
(Sorry, but that's all also stored in display.cfg...) - A. Look in ~/.jbidwatcher for files named error.##.log (where ## is a number).
On Windows it's usually:
C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\.jbidwatcher
On the Mac it's at:
/Users/{username}/.jbidwatcher
but you can't use the Finder to see it, you have to get to it from the Terminal.
On Linux, it's just:
~/.jbidwatcher - A. The most common answer is that eBay changed something, and JBidwatcher was
unable to recognize the response from eBay. JBidwatcher keeps error pages,
until the program is shut down. You can view them (if you haven't shut JBidwatcher
down yet) by choosing the auction which had an issue, right-clicking (or
control-clicking on a Mac) and selecting 'Show last error' to see what happened. - A. The context menu is the right-click menu. (Control-click on a Mac.)
JBidwatcher uses it in many places. Try, for example, pulling up the
context menu on the tab names themselves... - A. You actually do that by choosing the auction and selecting Snipe again
from the context menu. The new snipe amount overwrites the old snipe
amount. - A. Firstly, no JBidwatcher will not work. While I could design an algorithm
to break eBay's CAPTCHA, I will not, because it would be abused by people
looking to break into accounts. Secondly, it would be a great deal of
work to do (and increase the size of JBidwatcher substantially) just for
an eBay tool. Thirdly, eBay could easily change it so that my algorithm
no longer worked, and I'd be out that work, without anything useful for
my users.
Really the only answer for making the CAPTCHA go away is to stop using
JBidwatcher for a little while. JBidwatcher *cannot* bypass the CAPTCHA,
because that's what the CAPTCHA is designed to do.
The issue is this: eBay sees 'suspicious behavior' on your account,
of some kind. Very possibly multiple failed login attempts. They
turn on CAPTCHA's for it. They won't turn it off until the login
failures cease. JBidwatcher *normally* detects the CAPTCHA and
informs you that it won't even try to log in. They may have changed
the wording, so JBidwatcher isn't detecting it anymore, but the
underlying issue is the same.
As long as there's a CAPTCHA, JBidwatcher will fail to log in, which
will cause eBay to continue to show CAPTCHA's. You need to stop using
JBidwatcher for a little while, log in normally, and use eBay
normally. After a day or so, the security alert on your account will
go away, and you can log in normally. Then JBidwatcher should work
normally also. (Just make sure it's got the correct account
information in it, or the whole problem will start again. My
recommendation is to set the correct username/password in JBidwatcher,
save the config, and close and restart the program.)
eBay's security trappings are annoying, but they are just trying to
avoid people running 'bots' to try passwords against their user's
accounts.
A future version may have a 'once a day' requirement, that means that if
there's a captcha up, you have to manually respond to it once a day in order
to keep JBidwatcher working. It's about the best I can come up with, but it
should work. - A. No, JBidwatcher synchronizes it's view of the time every 30-40
minutes, using the time difference between your system clock and the
eBay clock as its adjustment to what your computer's clock says it is.
It tries very hard to line itself up with eBay's time. - A. Well, in the Configuration Manager (
File | Configure, or the
two-checkbox icon on the toolbar), under the 'Paths' tab, you can set
the save file path.
However, it doesn't save all files in there. Archived copies of the
auctions (and their thumbnails, and one backup) are kept in
~/.jbidwatcher/auctionsave, and that can't be configured through the
UI yet, for instance. However those files are all deleted when you
delete an auction from JBidwatcher.
There are also log files that get deleted under normal circumstances.
You can completely configure where JBidwatcher looks for things by
setting 'java.home' on the launch properties, but that's a lot harder
on Mac OS X than a configuration tab. (Some folks use this on Windows
to run entirely out of a USB stick, for instance.) On the Mac you'd
do it by editing either Info.plist or MRJApp.properties, I think. Not
for the faint-hearted.
So, you can get access to the save file pretty easily. But if you're
looking for all the auxiliary files that get created, that's a harder
problem. - A. Unfortunately JBidwatcher doesn't cleanly support two different eBay
accounts. There are tricksy ways to get it to work, but right now it's
not really straightforward. It's one of the features I want to put into
the next big version of JBidwatcher... - A. Try downloading the Sun Java runtime, and pointing directly to it.
In other words, if it installs to:
/usr/java/jdk1.5.0_09
you'd run JBidwatcher with:
/usr/java/jdk1.5.0_09/bin/java -Xms256m -Xmx768m -jar JBidwatcher-1.0.jar - A. It's inherited from Windows, but it can be configured... If you go
into JBidwatcher's Configuration Manager (the two checkbox icon, or
File | Configure), and go to 'advanced'.
For the key, type in 'selection.color', and for the value, you type a
hex representation of the color you want, in RRGGBB format. This
might not mean anything to you, so here are two colors that might be
good to start with:
C6A646for a slightly brown/tan-ish selection
and999999for a medium grey selection.
Some outrageous ones are:cc0000– bright red00cc00– bright green0000cc– deep blue (probably even more unreadable)
You could also use a web 'color picker' like:
http://www.pagetutor.com/colorpicker/picker2/index.html
and take the values out of the background box under the palette. - A. It doesn't, unfortunately. For that, you have to figure out shipping
using their tool, then set the shipping in the program (right-click
(or control-click on a Mac) on the auction, and choose 'Set Shipping'.
Once you've set the shipping cost, you can include it in a
multisnipe, and it'll figure it out based on the number you set. - A. It was a requested feature for multi-sniping... Mainly it means to
subtract the shipping and insurance from the amount you enter. So,
for example, if you want to pay a maximum of 50 *including* shipping
and (if relevant) insurance, then you'd enter 50 in the snipe box, and
check that note. All it does is subtract the shipping and insurance
from the amount you enter. This isn't too useful in the case of a
single auction, as you can calculate that for yourself.
However, when multi-sniping, it's definitely useful as items can vary
wildly in their shipping amounts.
If the shipping changes after you've placed the snipe, the value will
not adjust, it's a one-time setup. - A. That's not a good sign, unfortunately. I'd try going to the eBay
menu, and choosing 'Refresh eBay Session', or shutting down and
restarting JBidwatcher, to see if it helps. But if JBidwatcher can't
log into eBay, then it's not going to be able to snipe. - A. JBidwatcher places the bid directly itself, rather than driving the
browser, so no, you can leave your browser window closed if you'd
like. - A. If you right-click (or control-click ona Mac) on the tab names, you
can create new tabs. Create any number of tabs, and you can select a
set of items, right-click (or CTRL-Click) on the selected block of
auctions, and choose 'Send to...', and you should be able to choose
your new tab. - A. Download the Sun Java runtime, because the GNU libgcj / gij
version doesn't support a bunch of pieces of Java. I have no idea why
the various Linux distros are shipping it as default (especially
Redhat and Ubuntu), but it just doesn't work.
Go to:
http://java.sun.com/getjava
Download the current version of Java, install it, and change your
script to point directly to it, because otherwise the default version
will continue to be used. - A. In your Start Menu there's a section (under Programs, usually) named
'Startup'. If you right-click the JBidwatcher icon, drag it to your
Start Menu, wait for a moment (still holding the drag), it'll pop up
the menu, and you can drag to Programs, then to Startup, and then
finally drop it in the Startup folder. Because you did it with the
right-click button, it'll prompt you to copy, move, or create a
shortcut. Choose create shortcut, and a little icon of JBidwatcher
should show up in there.
Now it *should* startup automatically in the future. (Testing it
would be prudent, but I understand not wanting to shut down your
computer just to test.) - A. Under 'Edit', it's 'Show/Hide Toolbar'.
- A. That's often a signal of a network issue; the red eye only shows up
when it really can't get the pages from eBay at all. Sometimes this
can mean eBay has removed the pages (mainly on mature audiences
items), but usually it means that there's a problem connecting to
eBay. (This also happens when eBay has their occasional maintenance,
when you can't reach the pages.)
Click refresh all (the little button with the two arrows pointing at
each other) when you're sure you've got a good network connection, and
see if it helps. You might also try shutting down and restarting
JBidwatcher if you haven't already. - A. Look in:
/Users/{username}/.jbidwatcher
There should be 'auctions.xml', and a number of backups (the last 5
days, by date, and 5 hourly backups). First I'd suggest saving off
that directory (I'm presuming you've gotten the data transferred onto
a working drive), and then trying to copy the old auction files onto
auctions.xml until you find one that works.
If nothing else works, there's an 'auctionsave' directory, which
contains archives of the HTML (and thumbnails) for each of the
auctions it's seen (minus the deleted ones). It's possible in extreme
circumstances to use that list of auction numbers to retrieve the
original auctions if they're still on eBay, but that's really a
desperation option more than anything else.
User log in information is stored in 'JBidWatch.cfg', which
unfortunately isn't backed up in multiple files like auctions.xml, but
it can all be easily re-entered in the configuration manager. - A. I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but it's sorting on a column
which evidently doesn't have sane currency validation going on.
The core answer, though, is to shutdown (force-quit if necessary)
JBidwatcher, remove your display.cfg file and restart JBidwatcher.- Shut down JBidwatcher.
- Bring up Terminal (it's usually in Applications/Utilities)
- Type:
rm ~/.jbidwatcher/display.cfg - Now start JBidwatcher again.
size, and any custom columns you put in. (Sorry, that's all stored in
display.cfg...) - A. Yes. In fact, if you try to exit JBidwatcher when you have set a
snipe to happen, it'll warn you about that.
The JBidwatcher software places the bid directly with the eBay site,
when it's time; in order for that to work, JBidwatcher needs to be
running, and the computer needs to be on, and awake. Computers that
automatically go to sleep in such a way as to shut down networking,
and/or not let software continue running, will interfere with
JBidwatcher's operation. - A. JBidwatcher doesn't really do a very good job of doing currency
conversion. It relies entirely on eBay's vision of currency
conversion, and can only (more or less) convert between currencies
that it's currently monitoring. - A. Go to the configuration manager (the two checkbox icon, or File |
Configure), and go to the 'Advanced' tab. Here you can enter:selection.color
in the 'Configuration Key' box. Hit enter, and move to the
'Configuration value' entry. Here you can enter a hex value for the
color to use as the selection background. It uses the same format as
HTML (RRGGBB), for what it's worth. The first two hex digits (0-F)
are red, ranging from 00 as black to FF as bright red. The second two
are similarly green, the last two are blue. For instance, C6A646 is
the value I have as my selection color. (Actually, I have it set as
my Windows-wide selection color via the Display Properties panel, but
it works well on a per-app level also.)
JBidwatcher uses the system selection color, unless overridden. If I
were to change that to a different color as default, I would have far
more complaints that it wasn't behaving in a system-appropriate manner
than I have now about difficult-to-read lines. In the future I may
make it easier to configure all the various colors, but for now
the by-hand configuration is relatively straightforward. - A. One of the major reasons I don't charge for JBidwatcher is
that, unlike a spreadsheet which is entirely self-contained, it is
ALWAYS possible for JBidwatcher to be broken arbitrarily (and maybe
even permanently!) by matters entirely out of my and my users control.
I'd feel REALLY bad if I took someone's money as a sale, and eBay
went to captcha's for every login, for instance (to name a serious
issue that many of my users are facing).
I describe money people send me right now as donations, because if
they send me anything at all, I want it to be on account of the help
it has brought them in the past, and purely because they want to show
their appreciation, not necessarily what it will bring them in the
future. As they say in the financial industry, unfortunately:Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
- A. If a snipe is set, JBidwatcher always tries to bid at the end of the
auction.
If there are no other bids, JBidwatcher will still place a bid, and if
nobody else bids against you, you will get the item at the sellers
minimum bid price.
If you are already the highest bidder, the bid placed at the end of
the auction will not affect your existing high bid.
There is an exception, for example if you bid $20, and some other user
comes along later and bids $20, then you will be the high bidder as
exact ties are resolved to the earliest bidder. If you come back and
up your bid to $25 after that, for example via a snipe, then eBay
consider you bidding against the other (later) bidder, and will
ratchet up the bid to one minimum bid increment higher ($21, if I
recall).
Ties and near-ties are one of the more confusing parts for new eBay
users, but in all other cases JBidwatcher's bid will not affect the
current price if you are high bidder. (Not as true in Dutch auctions,
but Dutch auctions are more complex in many ways.)
An important feature I think you might have missed is the way eBays
bid process works. It is a specific type of auction, a 'highest
bidder, second price' auction.
What this means is that the highest bidder always wins, but they only
pay a price based on what the second-highest bidders price was. So if
you bid $1000, but the next highest person bids $10, you'll only have
to pay $10.50, which is one minimum bid over the 'second price'. This
is not just true of sniping, but of the normal bidding process on eBay
as well.
This is why JBidwatcher doesn't need a lot of time at the end of the
auction, to place lots of bids. It just places the one bid, your
maximum, and lets the underlying system manage the 'second price'
nature of it. - A. 'FP' is 'Fixed Price'. The (0) means no bids as yet.
The number in parenthesis is the count of bids so far. Since
fixed-price items don't have bids, I show FP instead, for
clarification. Or confusion, as it turns out. :) - A. Right-click (control click under Mac OS X) on the tab name
('current'), and there's a 'Custom Columns' submenu. Off that is
'Shipping', which is the amount registered in the listing for
Shipping.
If you want to, you can also choose 'Total', which is the current
price plus the shipping amount. (A useful value to sort on...) - A. Try right-clicking on the 'selling' tab itself, and you should get a
context menu that includes 'custom columns' (where you can set the
columns you want directly) and 'Properties', where you can choose the
columns you want via checkboxes. There should be a 'high bidder'
column available. - A. No. JBidwatcher does NOT do that, because that would be counter to
the point of sniping. Sniping is placing a SINGLE bid, once, at the
end of the auction, for the maximum amount you're willing to pay. It
does NOT keep you as the 'high bidder' of the auction all the way
until the end, because that's an explicitly bad position to be in.
It's a battle of knowledge. Every bid you place on-site exposes some
knowledge about you, and what you're willing to pay, and what you're
interested in. Sniping minimizes that information leakage by not even
showing that you're interested in an item until the last seconds of
the auction.
Picture it this way, if you have a max of $50, an item is currently at
$10, and you bid $11 to become the high bidder, and there's 3 days
left, the other bidder can come back, bid $12, or $15, or $20. If,
instead, you wait until there's 5 seconds left in the auction, and bid
for $50, then by the time they get an 'outbid notice' in their email,
the auction is already over, and you got it for $11, instead of going
back and forth with other bidders.
Now, if they had bid $65 originally, but the next highest bid (or the
minimum bid) was around $10, the amount they have to pay will suddenly
jump from $10 to $51, and they'll win it. Sniping works best against
people who try to lowball prices, in which case it's their own fault.
Sniping also works best if you put in what you are really willing to
pay for an item, so that if it goes over that number, you can walk
away comfortable that you wouldn't have been willing to pay that much
for it anyway. - A. Generally it's dependant on the speed of your net connection.
I don't recommend dialup users set their snipe any faster than 15
seconds, and recommend 20-30.
Depending on your DSL and how loaded your connection is, you can
probably go down to around 7-10 seconds.
With JBidwatcher I've sniped at 1 second on a REALLY fast connection,
but it was a corporate internet connection, lots of bandwidth,
super-low-latency, and an item I wasn't too concerned about losing.
I don't recommend anything near 1 second for home use; clock skew,
other programs slowing the system down, random emails coming in, or
any other internet traffic can make it so that a really close snipe
fails.
In fact, I generally advise against going closer than 5 seconds, and
even that is VERY close, and any variation in your local network
traffic or CPU availability can slow the snipe just enough to miss it.
If you want to be relatively safe, stick with 10 seconds on the very
fastest DSL lines, and increase it from there, capping out around
20-30 seconds on a slow dial-up connection. DSL is lower-latency than
cable, so cable should generally start around 15 seconds at the
fastest.
You'll notice that JBidwatcher loads some pages at about 2 minutes +
the snipe time before the end. It's not actually sniping, it's
preparing the bid page, so all it has to do is submit one page at the
last moment, to complete the bid. This is tuned to go as fast as it
can.
All that said, sometimes eBay flubs a page-load, and doesn't respond,
hanging the connection for 10-20 seconds, before it times out. When
that happens, there's nothing to do. It's why JBidwatcher can't
guarantee it'll successfully snipe; the variation of things that can
go wrong is far too large. It tries its best, though. - A. If you go into the Configuration Manager, into the
'advanced' section, and enter in:display.thumbnail
and set the value tofalse
it won't display thumbnails anymore. (Right-clicking, and choosing
'Show Info' will show it, although it still might have issues with
really large images.) - A. You can configure the double-click action to be 'Show in browser' in
the 'General' tab of JBidwatcher's Configuration Manager. Lots of Mac
OS X users do that, for instance. At that point you can double-click
on the item, and it'll pop up a browser window. - A. Unfortunately under OS/2 it doesn't know how to look for the 'default' browser. :(
Try this:
Go to Configuration Manager (File | Configure)
Go to the Advanced tab
Type:
browser.launch.OS/2
for the 'Configuration Key', and enter the path to launch your chosen browser in the
'Configuration Value' field.
Click 'Set', and 'Save'. You shouldn't need to restart JBidwatcher, but you might.
This *should* work, but not having OS/2 to test with, I can't be certain. - A. This is an extension of the OS/2 issue above...
The key is to figure out what the operating system name is, according
to Java. The property is 'os.name', and JBidwatcher only uses the first
part, cutting it off at any spaces that might be in the name. One
source for this is the 'What os or arch value can I use?' list.
So on that list, you'd see the 'os' field for OS/2 being just OS/2, so
you'd understand why the previous answer gives 'OS/2' as the part to put
at the end of:
but for Irix the configurationbrowser.launch.OS/2
key would be:
The configuration key is just whatever the local operating system pathbrowser.launch.Irix
to your favorite browser is. - A. JBidwatcher does a LOT of internal work to try and understand what your
network delay to eBay is, and takes that into account when placing a snipe.
So for instance, if you set 10 seconds, and JBidwatcher determines that
you have a 2-3 second lag time to eBay, it'll start sending the
confirmation form at 12-13 seconds before the auction ends.
Since it logs in and preps the bid at 2 minutes prior to end, and there's
only one page that needs to be submitted for the actual bid, this works out
pretty well.
Setting the number of seconds from the end to snipe should be how much
buffer you want, really. If you're on dial-up, the latency variation is
higher, so you want to set your snipe timer higher (like 20-30 seconds),
just to absorb that potential variation. If you're on Cable, you have less
variation, but still pretty high, so you might want to set your snipe timer
to 15-20 seconds. If you're on DSL or an equivalent, it's usually a pretty
predictable latency (barring BitTorrent or other bandwidth-hoggers), so you
can go down to 10-15 seconds. If you're on a corporate network, and it's
usually not saturated, you can get away with lower numbers even still.
But fundamentally, JBidwatcher tries REALLY hard to measure your latency,
and add that latency in to when it starts the actual snipe. - A. If you downloaded from SourceForge, it may be an html file with a list of
mirror sites. Be careful to follow the directions, or download directly
from the main site:
http://www.jbidwatcher.com - A. Just make a copy of the .jbidwatcher directory in your home directory.
On Windows it's usually:
C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\.jbidwatcher
On the Mac it's at:
/Users/{username}/.jbidwatcher
but you can't use the Finder to see it, you have to get to it from the Terminal.
On Linux, it's just:
~/.jbidwatcher
For Linux and Mac OS X (from the Terminal), you can just go:
cp -aRv ~/.jbidwatcher ~/jbidwatcher_backup
On Windows, just hold down Ctrl and drag the .jbidwatcher directory either to another directory,
or to a free spot in that directory. It will create 'Copy of .jbidwatcher',
which you can rename or do what you'd like with. - A. Okay, this isn't really a question people ask, but don't forget to look
inside JBidwatcher's own Help menu for the in-program FAQ! It's got a
lot of useful stuff about normal usage of the program, and some advanced
hints.