posted on September 22, 2000 05:33:07 AM
Had an odd technical glitch show up on eBay this week that other sellers will probably want to be aware of...don't know if this has been reported or not, but I've sure never seen it.
Zero feedback bidder captures the high bid on one of my auctions. When I notice her bid, I decide to see how long she's been registered, and click on her feedback rating from the auction page. System returns an "invalid user ID/NARU" message. After several attempts, always getting the NARU message, I canceled her bid and wrote her an e-mail telling her I'd canceled it because she was not registered.
Bidder responds to my e-mail, saying she'd registered that morning, received her confirmation, had successfully bid on a number of items, and everything was okay on her end. I went back to double check and see if she would show up as registered, and this time, I decided to do it the "long" way, by doing a manual search on her ID using the "see feedback about a user" link from within the feedback forum. System reported her ID as valid and returned the standard feedback page with her history and registration date.
After some futzing around, I finally figured out what was causing her to be falsely reported as NARU: her user ID was her e-mail address, and her e-mail address contained a "+" symbol. I noticed that when I clicked on her feedback rating and the system returned the "invalid ID" message, the e-mail address/user ID it was reporting as invalid was exactly the same as her ID -- *except* the system had replaced the "+" symbol with a blank space...so although I was asking for a feedback rating for user "[email protected]," the system was actually checking feedback (and thus returning an invalid ID message) for "janedoe @anywhere.com".
Note that she was *only* incorrectly reported as NARU when I checked her feedback by clicking on her rating -- her membership history & feedback came up fine when I did a manual search using the link from within the feedback forum.
I apologized and invited her to re-bid...fortunately, she did. (She also changed her ID after I told her what was happening so that she wouldn't continue to be inaccurately reported as NARU.) I don't know if other non alphanumeric characters in an e-mail address (aside from the "+" symbol) will cause this glitch to appear, but thought you guys might want to know about it in case you encounter a similar situation...if one of your bidders shows up as NARU it might be a good idea to check again from within the feedback forum to make sure they're "really" NARU before taking any action.
Just FYI.
(Edited to ask: Why did AW replace my subject line with a "0"? Is this just my week for technical boo-boos?)
[ edited by glassmelter on Sep 22, 2000 05:42 AM ]
posted on September 22, 2000 06:55:24 AM
Using a "+" a "?" a "&" a "=" and some other characters in your email address can cause all kinds of problems, not only at eBay, but at many sites, and it is usually not allowed by most ISP's.
The problem is that these characters are used to seperate items in a URL (web address.) Take a look at the address for this thread, and you will see lots of these characters. Each of them pass specific information to the server. So when you get one of these characters as part of the data, it can really confuse the server.
