Intermittent issues on Community platform- missing avatar, feedback score, listings

[sheila@ebay]

Hello everyone!

I wanted to let you know that Khoros is aware of the intermittent issues where avatars, feedback scores and listing have gone missing. I know that this is impacting some users or all users. It's not a fun experience!

There's an issue with one of Khoros' servers. I don't have an ETA on when this will be fixed but I'am pushing to get this fixed sooner than later.

[itscalledapostingid]

The "View Listings" link next to many usernames is missing again today 10/5/21  1:33PM

Some avatar pictures not showing too.

[dhbookds]

sheila@ebay 

3:54 10/5/21 Eastern time   missing info

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[magicjohnsonsvariety]

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sheila@ebay wrote:

Hello everyone!

I wanted to let you know that Khoros is aware of the intermittent issues where avatars, feedback scores and listing have gone missing. I know that this is impacting some users or all users. It's not a fun experience!

There's an issue with one of Khoros' servers. I don't have an ETA on when this will be fixed but I'am pushing to get this fixed sooner than later.

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Well, it's been 2 weeks now and still happening...so much for the sooner than later. 

[a_c_green]

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@magicjohnsonsvariety wrote:

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sheila@ebay wrote:

Hello everyone!

I wanted to let you know that Khoros is aware of the intermittent issues where avatars, feedback scores and listing have gone missing. I know that this is impacting some users or all users. It's not a fun experience!

There's an issue with one of Khoros' servers. I don't have an ETA on when this will be fixed but I'am pushing to get this fixed sooner than later.

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Well, it's been 2 weeks now and still happening...so much for the sooner than later. 

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sheila@ebay : With this afternoon being the Weekly Chat on general topics, can you please hit up Khoros for an actual update on the status of these problems? That way you can open the chat with some news, and save everyone from having to ask about it all over again. 😉

Note that "we're working on it" or "we'll get back to you" are not valid answers after all this time has gone by since the first reports. If the initial response is not helpful, escalate it. (This is a little like "asking for a supervisor," I know, but as you're contractually tied, you should be able to get better results than us civilians.)

One thing I noticed was that of the postings that did still have their listing links and feedback counts visible, they didn't work anyway. It appeared that the Khoros link was trying to call the eBay API named eBayISAPI.dll, but getting nothing in return. Perhaps Khoros has removed the dead links to spare us the distraction, though hopefully someone is actually trying to solve the problem rather than hide the symptoms. 

Ref: https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Sale/m-p/32337639#M1851044 

[sheila@ebay]

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sheila@ebay wrote:

Hello everyone!

I wanted to let you know that Khoros is aware of the intermittent issues where avatars, feedback scores and listing have gone missing. I know that this is impacting some users or all users. It's not a fun experience!

There's an issue with one of Khoros' servers. I don't have an ETA on when this will be fixed but I'am pushing to get this fixed sooner than later.

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There are a lot of paths I need to go through to get an issue escalated. Khoros considers a P1 as an outage (we can't log into the Community and we can't post in the Community). I actively communicate with Khoros support and our Technical Account Manager, so they're aware of these issues.

I'm as frustrated as you and the Community are. I don't like these 'we're working on it' responses from Khoros either. Sometimes that's all of the information I can get after all of my communications with Khoros.

I do have an update to share. It turns out that the missing custom profile avatar is related to an SSO issue. Data isn't getting properly sent from eBay to the Community and hence that's the reason why we're seeing missing avatars. I'm working on connecting our eBay SSO team and the Khoros team.

Now the missing feedback scores and listings, Khoros has said that they can't link it back to SSO because they don't have access to that information. I suspect it is, but in the meantime, Khoros is asking us to continue providing time/timezone and dates of when the Community sees these issues. 

Thanks @a_c_green for your understanding. 

[dhbookds]

well, I'll make my daily post at 6:31 p.m. Eastern time

[a_c_green]

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sheila@ebay wrote:
Now the missing feedback scores and listings, Khoros has said that they can't link it back to SSO because they don't have access to that information. I suspect it is, but in the meantime, Khoros is asking us to continue providing time/timezone and dates of when the Community sees these issues. 

Thanks @a_c_green for your understanding. 

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sheila@ebay : Thanks for your update! I'm a little puzzled as to why Khoros is claiming to need samples for this particular issue when, well, all you need to do is look at most any post in the Community to see that the links to listings, feedback count and avatar image are simply not there. I would tell Khoros to just have their developer(s) open an eBay/Khoros/Community account and see for themselves. 

I can add one thing now, which I noticed this afternoon after much ransacking of the Community postings during the Weekly Chat, hoping to find any that still showed a feedback count and listings link (and there are a few): those links did work to call eBayISAPI.dll and bring up the poster's feedback or listings to display. Previously, clicking on either would simply hang on a blank screen.

Just as a data point (and I have no idea how long this will work, if it even works at all for you), here is a link to a post I found that is still displaying feedback and a listing link that works: 

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Shipping/Is-this-a-scam-Buyer-wanting-to-send-me-a-shipping-label/m-p/... 

(Postings by the OP show the data; all of the replies by others, including me, do not.)

[dhbookds]

@a_c_green 

Thanks.......for the post..........I can't figure out why Khoros can't do their own testing either....

Two of my idiot questions........  and don't know if I can express them so they makes sense...

If there is a problem when one clicks on a link.......i.e. it times out/ "doesn't complete".......is that noted anywhere as a specific error of some kind?  Is that what "opening the logs" is meant to check?  I realize there could be millions of errors, if so; but even with millions, is there a way to search those errors for a specific problem......i.e. times out?  I realize it would also have to be narrowed down to ebay/community.

Secondly, are programs written to alert programmers to problems?  i.e.  50 (500/5000) specific errors are chalked up to anomalies......but over the amt automatically show an alert of some kind? 

[dhbookds]

sheila@ebay 

daily checkin.........I might say........this doesn't seem intermittent to me now....... seems it is permanent......

10/7/21 6:16 p.m.       Eastern time..........

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@dhbookds wrote:

well, I'll make my daily post at 6:31 p.m. Eastern time

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[fab_finds4u]

I lost my avatar 2-3 times but it came back in a few hours. Now it's been missing for 2-3 days. 

For about a week the feedback link has disappeared entirely. No listings to click on either. But before it disappeared it wouldn't load up. Nothing would happen when you clicked on it.

Hope that helps. 

[friskya]

As of this morning, the post you linked still shows OP's data, but no one else's. And the feedback/listings links are still functional.

Maybe Sheila@ebay can present the authors information to Khoros for comparison purposes - as in, what's different about their account that allows it to work properly here, while everyone else's is currently broken? Might give them a starting point in their search for a solution.

[maxine*j]

This intermittent problem has become a permanent one for me.   It's been three days since I've seen an avatar, or a link to feedback or listings.   All gone.  

The handy tools needed to give meaningful answsers to questions have been taken away from us.   Some people are so dedicated that they use time- and energy-draining workarounds, but most won't bother.   Once you've used a jackhammer or a wheel trencher, it's hard to accept being handed a sledgehammer or a shovel.

=

[a_c_green]

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@dhbookds wrote:

If there is a problem when one clicks on a link.......i.e. it times out/ "doesn't complete".......is that noted anywhere as a specific error of some kind?  Is that what "opening the logs" is meant to check?  I realize there could be millions of errors, if so; but even with millions, is there a way to search those errors for a specific problem......i.e. times out?  I realize it would also have to be narrowed down to ebay/community. 

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Yes, errors can certainly be logged in many ways: realtime alerts sent to someone (or to a group of someones on a list), or log entries written to a file, or messages sent back to the user (hopefully in the form of an error message that's clear enough to explain the problem), or any combination of the above.

The size of the log doesn't really matter, since editing software can pull out key errors of major interest, report generators can show how many of what kind occurred, and all that good stuff. The more important question is whether anyone is interested enough to look at it or motivated enough to fix it. If no one from the outside world is applying pressure in the form of complaints or problem reports, it's easy to ignore the whole thing, as software troubleshooting and support is nowhere near as revenue-generating as the next Shiny Thing that someone in Marketing wants to do.

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@dhbookds wrote:

Secondly, are programs written to alert programmers to problems?  i.e.  50 (500/5000) specific errors are chalked up to anomalies......but over the amt automatically show an alert of some kind? 

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It can, sure. It's up to the programmer to decide what part of the process needs monitoring, and how to respond when something goes sideways. Back in the days when I was writing code, I would routinely put in error messages and error handling along the way, even in areas where it was highly unlikely that anything would go wrong there, and so (of course), I would occasionally be amazed later on to see an error reported back from someplace that I could have sworn was rock-solid when I wrote it.

For example, cars since the 1980s have been running embedded software for engine management (among other things), and your Check Engine light is the front end of the problem management system. The car is usually set up to ignore minor problems unless they occur above a certain frequency or over a number of driving sessions, which will trigger the light and store an error code detailing the problem. If the issue stops occurring, the car might cancel the light after a certain number of error-free driving sessions, and delete the stored code(s). In worse cases, it might trigger the light immediately, or even flash the light (and, when flashing, it might convey a code number as well via a combination of blinks and pauses). It's all software that someone wrote, according to whatever rules they wanted to apply.

There is an outer layer of error handling that the operating system will enforce for its own protection, in case it's running software with some kind of gaping flaw, or maybe even a subtle problem that gets worse over time, such as a memory leak that starts to gobble up more and more system resources. Those error messages are not always pretty or user-friendly, but are safer then letting bad software continue to run.

Software for casual users like the general public has to either be user-friendly with its error handling, or have some fallback strategy for continuing without alerting the user, if it's possible to still get the job done in some way.

For example, I've noticed that sometimes when I open my Active Listings page (which has to make a ton of calls to various places to gather all the information that it shows), some bits of minor data such as my own feedback count don't always show right away. I'll see "(View feedback)" as a link in place of my usual feedback number, stuck in as a generic link to my feedback page because the system, at the instant that it was assembling my Active Listings page, was unable to get my actual feedback count for some reason.

Similarly, when I'm looking at the Purchase Details for some item on my Sold page, I will sometimes see the buyer's own email address shown in non-obfuscated form, apparently because the function that's supposed to return an encrypted ebay.com address for him instead failed to get the job done in time. (It might also be because some server isn't running the latest software. Hard to say for sure.) Hitting Reload will generally show the address encrypted as intended the next time around. 

So anyway, there are all kinds of good and bad software out there. The more important thing is how a company manages it, gets the problems solved, and communicates with its customers about it. What we're talking about in this case is a bit more complex, because we're one step removed from the location of the problem: we are eBay's customers, and eBay is Khoros' customer (one of many). The problem with missing data that we are seeing in the Community involves the link between eBay and Khoros, not eBay and us. We can only hope that eBay puts enough pressure on Khoros to get the problem fixed. (To be clear, from what I've been reading in other threads here, this is not entirely Khoros' fault, but may be due to internal changes made by eBay, so there is plenty of blame to spread around.)

[sheila@ebay]

Hello everyone!

Thank you for sharing date/time information with me. I've passed it onto Khoros and they've identified the issue.

As you know, when you log into the Community, you use the same credentials to log into the marketplace. There are a few fields that aren't getting passed over to the Community so I've pulled in the eBay SSO team to help resolve this issue. We just figured all of this out yesterday.

With that being said, it is Friday, though early Friday still and I might be able to get this resolved before the weekend. 

As I know more information, I'll pass it along. Thank you for your patience and I'm sorry that we have this issue. 

[dhbookds]

@a_c_green   Thanks for the thoughtful answers!!! It really does help me understand the process or lack of it, as the case may  be.  I have a tendency to think programmers "get" notification of things that go wrong.......and naturally they will look into it and fix it.  Obviously, not necessarily true.....

sheila@ebay   Appreciate the update.........Good news that the problem has been found...and that you are on  Ebay/Khoros for a solution.   Sooner is going to be better.......lol, I never realized how much I used the information before..........