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Countdown clock now dependent on bidder's clock ?
Has the auction countdown clock recently been reprogrammed to rely on the bidder's system clock?
Here are the facts:
1). Today I was bidding on an auction. The listing abruptly closed on me with about 30 seconds supposedly still remaining.
2). I have been on ebay for over 20 years and I've never had this happen before. Not once. That is, until today.
3). My Windows 10 computer has had the automatic time sync feature broken since 2019, so the system time is always off by up to over a minute. In this case, it was off by 34 seconds.
4). It used to be that the ebay auction countdown clock worked flawlessly, down to the very last second. Always. Despite the longstanding time sync issue in my own computer.
5). Today I noticed that if I manually change my windows 10 system time to be off (-34 seconds, or +34 seconds), the ebay countdown clock breaks, and starts behaving erratically. See my test here: https://img.2yr.net/ebay_countdown_clock_broken.mp4
6). To me this means that at some point, the countdown script was changed to rely on the system clock of the client computer being used (instead of using the ebay server clock like before).
7). When refreshing the page (on an auction with only seconds left), you can still briefly see the correct time remaining displayed for a split second (in black font) before the broken countdown script replaces it with a wrong value in red font.
Fixing the time sync issue in my computer will require reinstalling Windows.
I haven't been bidding a lot since August 2022, so this issue may well be months old.
Note that it is not possible to manually change the seconds in Windows 10. The best you can do is change the minute (and in doing so it does NOT set the seconds to 00). This is how I was able to change it to be -34 seconds off, or +34 seconds off, to do my little test.
The auction I was bidding on sold for $63, for an item I've previously paid $125 for. I was going to place a bid of $99. It is very likely this mishap cost this seller $37 in profits, if not more.
I am a career programmer myself, and it almost seems like ebay replaced an excellent countdown script that used a server-calculated value for the time remaining, to one that foolishly uses a JavaScript Date.getTime() function instead.
Other people have been reporting that the countdown "adds extra seconds at the end of auctions", which is likely caused by the same root problem.
When the windows system time is off by a positive value between 1 to 59 seconds, the auction ends abruptly.
When the windows system time is off by a positive value of 60 seconds or higher, the auction seems to add additional seconds.
When the windows system time is off by a negative value between 1 to 59 seconds, the auction counter shows that the auction ended, when it really hasn't yet, and does not refresh automatically and continues to show the bidding box.
Will ebay care? I doubt it but let's give it a try... Will you please give this directly to your programmers?
kh-vince
·3 years agoHi everyone,
Due to the age of this thread, it has been closed to further replies. Please feel free to start a new thread if you wish to continue to discuss this topic.
Thank you for understanding.
wailyn
·3 years ago07/30/2023
If your system clock is ahead by exactly one day, ie: it's Saturday but your clock says it is Sunday,
The eBay listing page will allow you to bid, then you will watch the countdown timer tick down to zero and eBay will state state that you have WON the auction and show "ENDED" in red on the listing.
But, in fact the listing will show elsewhere that the auction is still open and accepting bids. STUPID PROGRAMMING !
That guy should be fired.
sthero
·3 years agoThank you for the technical info, i knew the timer is java driven and gets refreshed if its off , you can disconnect from the net and it keeps counting down like a clock using the computers clock ? i CHECKED MY pc , Its time is 9 sec behind the official US time page ! Funny thing my Garvin watch which is GPS time synced is 2 seconds ahead of the US official on line page ! Page is off by 2 sec ? So now i can guess auctions end up to 9 sec earlier than the Ebay counter shows still available to bid ? But i have placed bids within less than 5 sec that go through during the week ! So somethings not right , consistent going on and its not a PC clock time setting thats the cause or it would be consistantly off by that amount of time !
4788richard
·3 years agoSame issue in Windows 7 Firefox and Google chrome.