posted on February 18, 2001 01:56:12 PM
One of the most irksome things about EBay's abysmal system reliability is that there is no way to find out what the system's recent problems have been. They try to avoid saying anything at all on their Announcements board, and even when they do say something, it's vague or inaccurate, and it quietly disappears sometime later. It seems like 90% of the problems that I experience go unmentioned. How is one to know if their auctions have been adversely affected, other than by logging in constantly to see if the auctions are still available?
It occurs to me that someone could write a bot-type program to check EBay in various ways (perform searches, etc.), then record whenever it receives the typical failure mode messages that you get when EBay is dead. The log of downtime events could be made public on the web. Has someone already done this? If so, what is the URL?? If not, is it because everyone is afraid of being banned or sued by EBay?
They monitor EBAYs "functionality" and put out an almost daily newsletter, which I receive, detailing every glitch. Not by 'bot, (I think) but by receiving reports from their members. I think the membership is pretty large.
There is a lot of other info there. It's work a look.
posted on February 20, 2001 06:32:31 PM
Thanks for the plug Victoria
We track ebaY outages via reports from users, monitoring ebaY (manually - not by bot) and monitoring the OAI/OTI discussion boards both on and off ebaY.
All the info is in TAGnotes, but we also post the outages on The Auction Guild website so everyone can have access to them. There is sometimes a delay of a day or two before they get put up on the website. -Rosalinda
TAGnotes - daily email synopsis about the Online Auction Industry http://www.topica.com/lists/tagnotes
