Obnoxious FileExchange bug - threatening account removal for sharing email
I have around 6,000 items listed - all with FileExchange uploads - warnings for bad store category at times, but mostly normal. I have recently found it useful to start the item title with some unique code text to make searching for my listing more rational (start the title with "zSALEz" and other of my sale items come back well on a search. This APPEARS to be because the search AI weights the first word of the title pretty highly). Before settling on "xSALEx" tags, I tried "+SALE+" and "@SALE@", which were *MUCH* less successful, probably because the AI stripped out the "+" and "@" when deciding what to return.
Additionally, I found it practical to add a block of links to other of my eBay items into my item description. this is to compete with the massive number of advertising links to rediculously unrelated items that eBay inserts into my item listing.
Now - on to the bug... On this morning's upload of a few items, one returned an error that my listing contained personal information - possibly an email link or phone number (which, of course, is a BAD thing and leads to account removal). My listing had nothing of the sort, but it did include a link to one of my "@SALE@" items. Suppressing that piece of link made the error go away. My guess is that "@" anywhere in the item description is probably verbotten.
One other FileExchange (Report Upload) glitch is just plain random errors during upload. These are far less than 1% - maybe 1 in 1,000 - and are things like a single listing in the middle of an upload file being rejected with a message like "you don't have the authority to do this". Simply re-submitting the same listing gets no error.
I am finally getting used to "Report Uploads" and "Report Downloads", but I still wish TurboLister was still around.
lacemaker3
·3 years ago@ducks2k,
You're not supposed to use special characters in the title or description. It's not allowed by eBay policy.
https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/listing-policies/item-description-policy?id=4372
ducks2k
OP3 years agogood to know, but obviously '"' is not a special character, and I've used "$" for years - so, is there a nice neat list of "special characters"?
ducks2k
OP3 years agolooking a little more closely - besides the ambiguity in what is a "special character", this policy statement refers to the item description. Clearly, I could list several hundred items with a title starting "@SALE@" with no objections from the uploading program. I'm pretty sure that this was the first case where I was linking to one of those "@" items from within the description. All of my item listings are generated by my own programs from my inventory database, so I fixed that aspect of the problem (if that was the actual problem). I guess my reason for making this thread was to observe that the existence of "@" in the description came back as a probable email address. I do not know what the AI thinks is a "phone number". There are a dozen ways to format one, most indistinguishable from valid non-phone numeric data.
wastingtime101
·3 years agoThat's correct. GF was listing an item where an @ symbol was part of the product name and she had to change it to the word 'at' when she got a warning for trying to include an email address.