ebay style auction system..

[memobug]

The software is written in perl and it utilizes the mySQL database

Ultimate Auction Requirements

Unix/Linux/FreeBSD Server
Perl 5 or Above
mySQL Database

Regards,

Matt

[pbjunkie]

Originally Posted by memobug

http://www.ultimateauction.net

You know, I don't like the layout for browsing. It should show thumbnails for some of the recent / closing auctions at every level you browse. It's boring text.

Regards,

Matt

Sorry to hear that Matt. I find nothing about the product boring. I love it!

[memobug]

Originally Posted by pbjunkie

Sorry to hear that Matt. I find nothing about the product boring. I love it!

I should probably be more clear about the problem. If you go to the Ultimate Auction demo site, and see there is one auction active, if you have a good eye, you might be able to find it in sports. So you click on sports, now it's in sporting goods, click sporting goods, now it's in soccer. Way too much browsing. It should have been visible in the header bar on the first page as a "latest auction" in that main category, and it should have been visible at every level as you drill down to it.

As it is, if you go to the browsing menu there is nothing new, nothing closing soon, etc.

Now I know on your own site, you have the plugin to display some auctions on your home page at http://www.pbjunkie.com/ That shows some recently closing auctions and it's interesting

But the auction menu itself at your Your auction homepage is the same boring text category based menu. Can you show thumbnails for the recent items on that screen? That would be good!

Regards,

Matt

[pbjunkie]

Originally Posted by memobug

I should probably be more clear about the problem. If you go to the Ultimate Auction demo site, and see there is one auction active, if you have a good eye, you might be able to find it in sports. So you click on sports, now it's in sporting goods, click sporting goods, now it's in soccer. Way too much browsing. It should have been visible in the header bar on the first page as a "latest auction" in that main category, and it should have been visible at every level as you drill down to it.

As it is, if you go to the browsing menu there is nothing new, nothing closing soon, etc.

Now I know on your own site, you have the plugin to display some auctions on your home page at http://www.pbjunkie.com/ That shows some recently closing auctions and it's interesting

But the auction menu itself at your Your auction homepage is the same boring text category based menu. Can you show thumbnails for the recent items on that screen? That would be good!

Regards,

Matt

Matt the main page shows featured items (http://www.pbjunkie.com/cgi-bin/auction/main.pl) and there's a button for the gallery, which shows the items as well. All these areas are defined by the seller when they put the item up for auction. What I mean is, do you want your item in the gallery? If so, that could be $.25 charge and so on. All this added functionality is there but it's defined by the owner and available to the seller for a price (if that's how you set the auction package up for your community). Mine however is free and my users are just now starting to figure that out.

The text based menuing system you describe will always be there and correct me if I'm wrong but I think what your describing doesn't even exist at eBay for goodness sake.

I hate to say it Matt, but it seems like you?re not even interested in giving this new package a chance. Everything I read from you is basically negative in nature and you've already said you?re going to pass and wait for some positive feedback yet you continue to post questions and what you don't like about it.

Since the price tag is more than your willing to spend for a new product without lots of reviews, I'm willing to cover half the cost just to here some positive feedback next to your alias. Deal?

If not, I recommend you start looking at vbTrader for your needs.

Rich

[memobug]

I hate to say it Matt, but it seems like you?re not even interested in giving this new package a chance.

I have made every reasonable effort to give it a chance. As you know, I've emailed the vBauction site a couple of times trying to get more information, specifically about which versions of vB are supported, what kind of payment methods they accept and so forth but I haven't heard anything back. I've even checked back on that site a few times to see if that info had been added somewhere.

Everything I read from you is basically negative in nature and you've already said you?re going to pass and wait for some positive feedback yet you continue to post questions and what you don't like about it.

I'm sorry that you take it that way.

*I posted one question

Which version(s) of vB are supported?

about this product in another thread. And when it didn't get answered, I dropped you a PM.

*I answered two or three questions about this product in this thread. I did make two comments, one in each thread - that I didn't care for the layout, and that I thought the price was excessive without having any feedback on this. I did go on to say I might buy vBauction if it did get good feedback. That's not negative, is it?

Concerning your perception of negativity in "everything (you) read from (me)," I think you are reading something into these responses that aren't there.

1. Is This post negative? I thought it was helpful and to-the-point. I didn't say "Perl is bad" or "I dont' like CGI" like another poster:

2. Does this post show your friend's product in a bad light? I don't think so. If anything it supports CGI methods other than PHP.

3. When another poster said vBauction should have a support forum. I did post that there was a (private) support forum.

As an aside Rich, I think I have every right to post questions and comments about software, especially that which people are advocating or offering for sale. I myself am not trying to sell anyone on an alternative, so if this is ad hominem, I just don't get it. I would think you would appreciate this, being that your profile says "I'm blunt and I tell it like it is! "

Since the price tag is more than your willing to spend for a new product without lots of reviews, I'm willing to cover half the cost just to here some positive feedback next to your alias. Deal?

Would I buy vBauction if the price were $60, or so, as an early adopter? Almost certainly, but not with the proviso that I would post positive feedback about it if I didn't like the way it works.

Anyway if you are convinced I am a negative person, go ahead and click on my past posts and read a few past responses, questions, suggestions. Perhaps a few unrelated to this thread, too.

Regards,

Matt

[pbjunkie]

Originally Posted by memobug

Anyway if you are convinced I am a negative person, go ahead and click on my past posts and read a few past responses, questions, suggestions. Perhaps a few unrelated to this thread, too.

Regards,

Matt

I'm going to do today what I should have done yesterday and that's keep my mouth shut. I did write up this big reply in response to you Matt (because I am blunt and to the point) but what good is that going to do? It's only going to get worse and I'm just a customer and don't need the headache.

I'm not afraid to admit when I'm wrong and yes I'm wrong. My excuse? I'm the only customer here trying to let everyone know it's a great package and also trying to answer everyone's questions. Look at today. I'm reading your reply Matt and I'm reading in the other thread "how terrible my site looks in sections". And for what?

Yes, I probably read into several of your comments the wrong way and it was not my intention that paying for half would get some promised positive feedback. My intention was that you would see how great a package it is and the positive feedback would come naturally.

I know you?re not a negative person and your doing exactly what I would be doing given the situation.

Rich

[memobug]

Hi Rich,

I wanted to let you know that I did receive an email back from vbAuction support concerning some of the questions I'd asked late last week. I'll include the responses that I think might be of general interest:

Q1. The response to the question of which vB versions are supported was
A: "It should work with any VB version…"

Q2. Is it done in PHP or some Zend optimized thing. (I hate Zend!)
A: "It is php as far as vbulletin integration goes and the rest is in perl"

Q3. Any other sites in operation that I can see? (other than pbjunkie's?)
A: "This is new software there have been some purchases but everyone is still configuring there except for pbjunkie.com"

LICENSING
Since compatibility seems not to be an issue, I went ahead and bought a license. The checkout via Paypal went smoothly, but the "automatic" generation of the license part did not happen "instantly" as had been indicated. I think it had to be done manually, but I had the license the next AM after sending an email to vbAuction support. The checkout screen advises that you keep logging in and out and checking every 15 minutes, but I would not suggest anyone do that at this point.

REGISTRATION and FORUM ACCESS
After just registering to purchase and even before the purchase was complete, you can access the link to the Owners forum. There you can see the comments and remarks. It appears at this point that there is due to be a new release of the software possibly as early as tomorrow. I will probably wait for that before doing an install.

It would probably be a good idea for anyone interested in this software to go ahead and click BUY IT and sign up for preregistration, which they can do before actually paying. They can read what's in the forum and see if it's worth their while to take the next step and buy it via Paypal (or not).

I am not saying there is anything in the forum that's really positive or negative at this time. There are a couple posts by people that are having some installation issues and the notice that the new version is due out in a couple of days (which would be tomorrow)

INSTALLATION
The chief concern I have at this point is that vbAuction actually shares the vB database, and I don't want it to take out my forum if it should go haywire, either at installation or somewhere down the road. I much prefer the Photopost way of offering a separate database, if the installer wants. I hope that vbAuction will at least support table prefixes for itself. If not, I'll need to be very careful with it.

I appreciate your feedback and attempt at trying to publicize this software. I have high hopes for it on my own forum.

Regards,

Matt

[memobug]

I thought it worth updating this thread. I would advise anyone considering the purchase of this software to wait until they start seeing some additional installations of this software.

After putting about 20 hours into this, I have not been successful yet in getting vBauction operating properly. I am not sure if anyone other than Rich (pbJunkie) has. There are a few very real problems at this point. I am trying to remain optimistic, but the site developer has been silent for a couple of days now since an update version was released. At that time he offered to help people out free with their installations, but he hasn't responded to any of the forum postings since that time.

A sampling of the problems I have been trying to deal with.
1. The admin panel doesn't work properly because there is a mismatch in the parameters and terms. Other people have this, too. If you attempt to do something as simple as changing a password, it will just corrupt your parameters and you can't even log in anymore.
2. Users are not automatically imported into vbAuction, I am not sure how this is supposed to work but I know that I am showing a user count of zero even though I have posted two auctions myself
3. None of the auctions I posted are actually browsable. I get errors when I try to load those pages.
4. I have an incorrect count. I posted two auctions and three are showing. One is a phantom and there is nothing in that category.

Beyond this there are some useability concerns.

1. The thumbnails that appear in the various charts aren't generated by GD or ImageMagick. They are faked with HEIGHT and WIDTH tags. This means if you have the default 100K max upload size, you could potentially have a page with 10 thumbnails occupying 1megabyte of download, and that could take minutes to pull down by modem.
2. I found a really old offsite link in the help file that has since been redirected to a porn site.

I would feel a lot better if the guy would just acknowledge the issues and say he is working on them and will update us when there's a fix. Instead I feel like I'm twisting in the wind.
Regards,

Matt

[ImportPassion]

thanks for the update. i was contemplating this purchase.

[memobug]

I have corrected several bugs myself and posted the modifications required to the vbauction user site. There is an import utility provided to transfer users from vB to the vBauction system. Unfortunately, it's set up to transfer everyone (banned, coppa, etc) so I modified that as well.

I am planning to add a few features to this before I try a beta test with some forum members. Mainly I need something to make real thumbnails. I have not been impressed by the level of support we've seen. It's close to non-existent. I don't know if the seller is the coder, or what. If I had paid for this and didn't have the skills to fix it, I would be pi$$ed.

Regards,

Matt