08 Feb 2006 at 15:51 - 136
Hi. I'm sorry, I'm in a rush, so don't have time to read through all four pages. Someone may have mentioned these already, so please disregard my post if you area already aware of them.
I'm having two bugs in the new auction section. Firstly, it will not remember my login. I select remember me every single time I log in out of habit and it never remembers. Before you ask, no, I do not have cookies disabled or anything like that. I should, but, I got sick of having to deal with non-functioning or partially broken sites or having to physically choose whether or not to accept each and every single one of the thousands of cookies that I have to go through. Cookies are 100% enabled even with invalid addresses and such, and are accepted from third parties because a few sites still broke even if I disabled that.
I'm thinking the cookie problem may be browser related. I think I've had troubles with a forum once not remembering my login simply because I was using Opera. They used some kind of setting that expected to see certain browser IDs and when they didn't get it they failed to function or something. Mind you, I haven't had that problem again until the auction section of this site. I might add that the forums here remember my seperate login without a hitch.
Also, I've noticed the system allows duplications of many things. I guess if you accidentally double click or something. For example, I made the mistake of hitting back after modifying an auction to modify a bit more (it keeps messing me up that even if I put in no HTML code I still have to put in the break tags to put text on seperate lines) and it made a duplicate of my auction. Right down to the part where it had just under 11 hours left. Also, one person gave me feedback and I'm guessing they double clicked submit or something because I have a duplicate of their feedback, giving me two points when, to be honest, I really should only have one. I'd say please take your time fixing that one, but, realistically speaking, some people out there may end up receiving a duplicate of a negative value (I plan to never receive even a first one, but, you never know with some people.)
I think using some kind of unique ID code on things that could cause duplicates would solve this problem. For example, when modifying the auction, all you have to do is include a check for the auction ID tag. If the browser shows the same tag, then the user didn't intend to create a new auction but obviously to edit the old one. Same general idea goes for user reviews. I'm thinking you could just simply take the user id of the user who's posting the review, and then stick the auction ID tag of the auction they are reviewing from at the end. Presto, you have a unique ID specific to that one review.
EDIT: Oops, I forgot before, but, most importantly of all, there are some serious annoyances. Such as when attempting to edit your auction. Several fields loose their values to incorrect ones, and the description field actually dissapears. Nearly every edit requires TWO edits because the description dissapears and you have to fix it. The bid increment field blanks, and the reserve and buy now prices loose all but the first digit (changing the entire SCALE of the auction. Soemone's at risk of selling some uber-expensive item for, say 1g because of this sort of thing if someone pounces fast enough to catch such a bug before the seller could.)
BTW, the forum just forgot my login too. Could be the cookies are set to expire relatively quickly? I don't know what they are set to so couldn't say. It seems to remember me for a while, so that may not be a bug, just checking. Oh, and the auction pages aren't forgetting me due to expired cookies because it's basically session only requiring me to log in every single new session whether or not it's been any amount of time (once I closed that tab, realized I forgot something, opened a new one, and found I had to log back in during the two seconds it took me to do that.)
Minor bugs aside, I must say that this whole ebay-style auction thing is a very neat idea and an invaluable tool -- especially in the long run once it builds up enough users for us all to buy and sell more easily. Thank you for giving us such a tool.