ShipScript has been an eBay Community volunteer since 2003, specializing in HTML, CSS, Scripts, Photos, Active Content, Technical Solutions, and online Seller Tools.
@berserkerplanet wrote:
I'm thinking along the lines of fixing the problem on the fly during the listing editing process (maybe after major cleanup is done with your tools to get rid of all the excess baggage - repeated font tags, templates, active content links, etc).
<font[^>]*rwr="1"[^>]*> takes care of the unwanted tags anywhere in the listing body in Replace-o-matic script, but leaves the matching [/font] tags since it's just a simple one pass search and replace (which makes using it a pointless exercise). It could be modified to be dedicated to this task, to wipe out the [font rwr="1"] tags, keep a count of how many were removed, and try to remove an equal number of [/font] tags from (near?) the end of the description. Still thinking about that vs just directly modding the descriptions on the fly as soon as the listing editor page opens with a GreaseMonkey script (using the same approach). Or I'll just continue to manually rip them out as I have been. (those tags are always at very top and very bottom of my listings because I list in HTML and keep them tidy 🙂
@berserkerplanet Of course, fixing on the fly would be optimal, but sellers who don't use firefox won't know their listings are failing. I assume the font tags are duplicating under other browsers? I don't have any to test.
The regex should be expanded to include apostrophes because I am now seeing both quotes and apostrophes around the value in listings. I assume that change means the seller has switched browsers, but it could also be an internal eBay change.
This is the regex my tool currently uses. Perhaps the seller wants the first font, so it only works if three or more are found, indicating nasty nesting. Then another regex looks for a similar number of closing tags at the end of the code and the tool generates two new regex filters to remove the lower of the two counts from the outside inward if both conditions are met. That matches what you would like to do.
/(^(\s*\<font[^>]+?rwr=["\']*1["\']*[^>]*?\>){3,})/iSomeone like you who knows what is supposed to be in the source code could be more aggressive and just use one regex to remove all font tags.
@shipscript wrote:
The Bulk Active Content Editor and the Sandbox tool both have a checkbox to remove those extraneous eBay font wrappers, as shown implemented in this Sandbox example where the Markup tab color-codes all those elements.
But the tools only work when the <font rwr> tags are first in the code and the matching </font> tags are last in the code since the tools do not parse elements. If the seller adds an eBay fixit tag to the front, or a promo widget to the end, the tools won't remove the locked-in eBay font tags.
For sellers who do not use font tags at all because they use embedded styles, a regex filter can remove all font tags, regardless of where they are located and regardless of whether they are eBay's, as illustrated in this Sandbox example. On the markup tab we can see that the 800 font tags are all over the place.
I think this growing font issue on eBay's new listing form might be something that brian@ebay could take back to the programmers. I'm seeing more and more disappearing listings as sellers continue to relist or sell similar. And Brian, we've all been wondering what rwr="1" stands for in those eBay tags.
Hi @shipscript, thanks so much for all the details provided here. While I'm not sure if the display issues in Firefox are related to the font tags mentioned, I'm happy to send this over to the developers for review and update you when I have more details.
