bidwatcher
Bidwatcher is a tool for eBay users that tracks your current bids and listings and has an integrated snipe tool. You can run bidwatcher in the background and it periodically checks your auctions status, and executes any bids that are scheduled.
| Tags | Internet Web Office/Business Financial |
|---|---|
| Licenses | GPL |
| Operating Systems | POSIX Linux |
| Implementation | C++ C |
Recent releases
- 12 Nov 2005 06:48
Release Notes: The eBay parser was fixed and libcurl support was added. Many little fixes were made and a potential security bug was fixed. The Seller ID was added to the Log. The program should now compile on cygwin and be more compatible with BSD.
- 31 Aug 2004 14:15
Release Notes: Parsing of eBay pages was fixed. A parsing error which led to a segmentation fault was fixed. Snipe key handling was improved. Proxy handling was improved. A new feature to "snipe groups" was added.
- 23 Apr 2004 20:56
Release Notes: Time synchronization was fixed and made more fault tolerant.
- 21 Apr 2004 00:08
Release Notes: Support for the longer eBay auction numbers was added along with configurable fonts and minor bugfixes.
- 01 Mar 2004 20:48
Release Notes: Bidding and sniping functions were fixed.
Recent comments
Why did this appear 11-Nov-2005 as an update?
The code is still from February, and still doesn't work.
Nor is CVS any newer. :-(
dead project
what was once a nice and useful application appears to have fallen into disrepair and neglect.
some months ago ebay changed their output and bidwatcher sniping stopped working. and now i am unable to even add new auctions as it thinks the auction numbers are invalid.
looks like the only alternative now is ebayagent.
sniping doesn't work at this point
The docs emphasize that bidwatcher is not meant mainly as a sniping tool, and that using it that way is inherently unreliable. But anyway, as of 2005 Apr 24, bidwatcher 1.3.17 (which appears to be the most recent release, although presumably not as up to date as the cvs version) doesn't seem able to snipe successfully. In my .bidwatcher directory, I have a file that looks like it logged the error, but it was simply "Snipe failed: unknown reason." I guess this is just the nature of the beast -- from what I understand, ebay's API isn't available for free, and html-parsing is inherently unreliable, since ebay will change the html from time to time.
Tool currently broken
Bidwatcher is an excellent tool when it works, but they have not made an updated release since eBay changed their web page and broke Bidwatcher's bidder more than 3 months ago. The latest CVS version may (or may not) fix the problem. The CVS head didn't compile for me, but I didn't spend much time messing with it.
If you haven't used bidwatcher in a few days or more, always test a real-time bid before relying on the snipe function for anything important. Because if a snipe fails (due to eBay changing their html submission process), you probably won't have enough time to bid manually.
Re: broken?
We can't use the API. eBay charges for usage of the API.
Anyway, new version finally released to fix the problems.
> maybe the format of their page changes,
> but their API shouldn't be changing. I'd
> assume you're using the API and not
> parsing out web pages.
