JBidwatcher

Free eBay sniping, bidding & monitoring

Simplify your eBay experience!
No longer supported as of March, 2021. Thanks for the years of support and enthusiasm! It was a good run...
Try Gixen for your sniping needs; I respect the author a lot, and they've been doing it around as long as I had.

Please

Stable Version
May 25, 2014
JBidwatcher 2.5.6

Edge Version
January 13, 2016
JBidwatcher 2.99pre5
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JBidwatcher has been

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JBidwatcher Frequently Asked Questions

  1. Why aren't you responding to my email? Is JBidwatcher still supported?
  2. How do I get items into JBidwatcher from Safari?
  3. What means, if my eBay name (in the right top corner) is cancelled?
  4. I'm having sign-in problems...
  5. I've recently lost all visibility to my auctions. Under the 'current' tab I can't see anything, and under the 'complete' tab, I can see the time/date listed in the left column but that's it.
  6. How do I look at JBidwatcher's error logs?
  7. I received an 'unknown error' bidding or sniping on an item? What happened?
  8. Where is the context menu? I cannot find it.
  9. How do I change my snipe amount?
  10. I'm getting a CAPTCHA (a small graphic with words, letters, or numbers on a complex background) prompt whenever I log in to eBay through my web broswer. Will JBidwatcher still work? What can I do to make it go away?
  11. Do i have to synchronize the Time manually? Or what have i to do, if the PC-time is different from the eBay-Time?
  12. Is there another way to get the old auctions saved to an external file for reference so I can clean out my completed auction files?
  13. Does JBidwatcher support multiple eBay users or if not, if I can run two sessions one with each user?
  14. Any way to get JBidwatcher working with fedora core 6's version of Java?
  15. In Windows, it is hard to read the amount of the bid when the item is highlighted/selected with the dark blue back-colour. I don't know if this is just inherited from the Windows colour scheme or if it can be configured somehow.
  16. how does it calculate what my shipping costs would be if the seller has one of those "enter your zip code to calculate your shipping costs..."?
  17. Can you explain "auto-subtract shipping and insurance (p/p)" in the sniping box?
  18. We get a "not logged in...." The reason is "read timed out" Will snipe work?
  19. Hi, I was just wondering if I needed my IE (or Firefox or Opera) window open when the program is working.
  20. Would it be very difficult for you to implement in a future version something like "custom folders" i.e. groups in which one can sort his auctions and which possibly can be given custom names? (for example "furniture", "paintings", "toys" etc.)
  21. JBidwatcher won't run under (recent version of Linux). I'm running the following version of java
    $ java --version
    java version "1.4.2"
    gij (GNU libgcj) version 4.1.1 20060525 (Red Hat 4.1.1-1)
  22. I lost a bid today, because I restarted my computer this AM and didn't realize that jbidwatcher would not load and start on it's own. That is, I have to click on the icon to activate it. Is there a way (such as in the start up menu) that I can get it to run automatically when the computer starts?
  23. I was looking for something in JBidwatcher and changed the display of the appearing 'window', the icon 'basket' etc. vanished, how can I reactivate them?
  24. I'm seeing the red cancelled eye is inserted on all positions. What's wrong?
  25. My HD of my Mac crashed. Now my list of "complete" is lost and my access data. Can you tell me where I can find the corresponding files in Mac OS X?
  26. I get errors like this in my log file / in the Console view under OS X when I try to launch JBidwatcher:
    Thu Sep 07 18:41:18 CEST 2006: JBidWatcher: java.lang.ClassCastException: Currency cannot compareTo different currencies! Cannot compare different currencies. java.lang.ClassCastException: Currency cannot compareTo different currencies! Cannot compare different currencies.
    at Currency.compareTo(Currency.java:610)
    at BaseTransformation.compareCurrency(BaseTransformation.java:194)
    at BaseTransformation.compareByClass(BaseTransformation.java:165)
    at auctionTableModel.compare(auctionTableModel.java:453)
    What does it mean, and how can I fix it?
  27. If I have a snipe set on an auction, do I have to leave my computer on with JBidwatcher running for this to work?
  28. I was wondering if it would be possible to have a converted currency tab in it? (I would like to know the amound in Euro's).
  29. Might I suggest a small change for the next version? Change the highlight colour for the currently selected item
  30. JBidwatcher is a great program, and really useful! Why don't you charge money for it?
  31. If here are no bids, will program still work and bid opening bid for me? Or, if I already have highest bid, will it just let it go and not bid up, so I will win?
  32. On the Current column some of the prices are listed with (0) and some are listed with (FP). What is FP?
  33. Is there any way to see the s&h on the main screen? Ideally I would like to see the total of the current price and the s&h added together.
  34. I just can't find a way of displaying the high bidder in the selling tab.
  35. I assumed that the bidding would just take care of itself, that everytime I got outbid, the auto-snipe feature would bid for me AND snipe.
  36. What is the shortest time to snipe a bid?
  37. It would be nice to either be able to turn off the "tooltip" pictures
  38. Is it possible to bring up an item on eBay by clicking on the number in JBidWatcher?
  39. Browser detection and launching always uses 'Netscape' on platforms other than Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. Specifically under OS/2 (eComstation or eCS) it always tries to launch 'netscape'.
  40. What about browser detection for IRIX, FreeBSD, etc...?
  41. I want to optimize my snipe time; how can I get JBidwatcher to do that? How does JBidwatcher deal with potential network delays? What are the recommended snipe times (seconds before auction ending) to set for different kinds of connections? (Cable, DSL, etc.)
  42. How come I only get a file of about 1200 bytes. When I try to use the jar or to untar the gz file, I get messages indicating that the file is corrupt or wrong format?
  43. How do I back up my JBidwatcher data?
  44. Are there any other FAQs?

  1. A. I am unfortunately very busy, both with work, and other independant
    projects (that I hope may someday be the next JBidwatcher). It takes
    me around 5-10 minutes per email to respond, and I get enough that I
    wouldn't have the time to spend with my wife, much less other
    projects, were I to respond to all of them.

    I read every email, and I really try to respond to as many as I can,
    but sometimes a week goes by where I just don't have the chance, and
    then I'm behind by an unresolvable amount. At that point my only
    reasonable option is to let things fall on the floor.

    JBidwatcher is definitely still being supported. If I ever choose not
    to, that will be front-and-center in big letters on the JBidwatcher
    home page. Also, if I ever do decide to stop, the first thing I'll do
    is try to see if anyone else is interested in maintaining it.

    I don't see me stopping JBidwatcher any time soon, though. In fact,
    I'm actually working on the 'next version' of JBidwatcher, with a
    changed UI, and lots of advanced features.

  2. A. If you are viewing the item, the address bar generally has a favicon at
    the leftmost part of the address bar. Drag that to JBidwatcher, and drop
    it, and it should add fine.

  3. A. If your eBay name has a 'strikethrough' over it, it means
    JBidwatcher is having trouble logging in as you, and it means that a snipe
    on your behalf might not fire. You should hover your cursor over the
    strikeout, and a tooltip should pop up and let you know what it thinks is wrong.

  4. A. If you're having sign-in problems, the most likely issue is eBay putting up a
    captcha, in which case you need to actually stop using JBidwatcher for a day or
    so, log in normally (through your browser) and let eBay's security system relax
    about your account.

    If you're running Windows, it may be a different kind of security failure.
    First, upgrade your version of Java by going here:
      http://java.sun.com/getjava
    and install that. It may help, especially if you're seeing something about SSL or certificates.

  5. A. The way to resolve this under Mac OS X (where it seems to happen more than other platforms) is as follows:
    1. Shut down JBidwatcher.
    2. Bring up Terminal (it's usually in Applications/Utilities)
    3. Type:
      rm ~/.jbidwatcher/display.cfg
      If that gives an error, your display configuration has probably moved. Try:
      rm ~/Library/Preferences/JBidwatcher/display.cfg
    4. Now start JBidwatcher again.
    It should have returned the display to correct, although you'll have lost window placement, size, and any custom columns you put in.
    (Sorry, but that's all also stored in display.cfg...)

  6. A. Look in ~/.jbidwatcher for files named error.##.log (where ## is a number).

    On Windows it's usually:
    C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\.jbidwatcher
    On the Mac it's at:
    /Users/{username}/.jbidwatcher
    but you can't use the Finder to see it, you have to get to it from the Terminal.
    On Linux, it's just:
    ~/.jbidwatcher

  7. A. The most common answer is that eBay changed something, and JBidwatcher was
    unable to recognize the response from eBay. JBidwatcher keeps error pages,
    until the program is shut down. You can view them (if you haven't shut JBidwatcher
    down yet) by choosing the auction which had an issue, right-clicking (or
    control-clicking on a Mac) and selecting 'Show last error' to see what happened.

  8. A. The context menu is the right-click menu. (Control-click on a Mac.)
    JBidwatcher uses it in many places. Try, for example, pulling up the
    context menu on the tab names themselves...

  9. A. You actually do that by choosing the auction and selecting Snipe again
    from the context menu. The new snipe amount overwrites the old snipe
    amount.

  10. A. Firstly, no JBidwatcher will not work. While I could design an algorithm
    to break eBay's CAPTCHA, I will not, because it would be abused by people
    looking to break into accounts. Secondly, it would be a great deal of
    work to do (and increase the size of JBidwatcher substantially) just for
    an eBay tool. Thirdly, eBay could easily change it so that my algorithm
    no longer worked, and I'd be out that work, without anything useful for
    my users.

    Really the only answer for making the CAPTCHA go away is to stop using
    JBidwatcher for a little while. JBidwatcher *cannot* bypass the CAPTCHA,
    because that's what the CAPTCHA is designed to do.

    The issue is this: eBay sees 'suspicious behavior' on your account,
    of some kind. Very possibly multiple failed login attempts. They
    turn on CAPTCHA's for it. They won't turn it off until the login
    failures cease. JBidwatcher *normally* detects the CAPTCHA and
    informs you that it won't even try to log in. They may have changed
    the wording, so JBidwatcher isn't detecting it anymore, but the
    underlying issue is the same.

    As long as there's a CAPTCHA, JBidwatcher will fail to log in, which
    will cause eBay to continue to show CAPTCHA's. You need to stop using
    JBidwatcher for a little while, log in normally, and use eBay
    normally. After a day or so, the security alert on your account will
    go away, and you can log in normally. Then JBidwatcher should work
    normally also. (Just make sure it's got the correct account
    information in it, or the whole problem will start again. My
    recommendation is to set the correct username/password in JBidwatcher,
    save the config, and close and restart the program.)

    eBay's security trappings are annoying, but they are just trying to
    avoid people running 'bots' to try passwords against their user's
    accounts.

    A future version may have a 'once a day' requirement, that means that if
    there's a captcha up, you have to manually respond to it once a day in order
    to keep JBidwatcher working. It's about the best I can come up with, but it
    should work.

  11. A. No, JBidwatcher synchronizes it's view of the time every 30-40
    minutes, using the time difference between your system clock and the
    eBay clock as its adjustment to what your computer's clock says it is.
    It tries very hard to line itself up with eBay's time.

  12. A. Well, in the Configuration Manager (File | Configure, or the
    two-checkbox icon on the toolbar), under the 'Paths' tab, you can set
    the save file path.

    However, it doesn't save all files in there. Archived copies of the
    auctions (and their thumbnails, and one backup) are kept in
    ~/.jbidwatcher/auctionsave, and that can't be configured through the
    UI yet, for instance. However those files are all deleted when you
    delete an auction from JBidwatcher.

    There are also log files that get deleted under normal circumstances.

    You can completely configure where JBidwatcher looks for things by
    setting 'java.home' on the launch properties, but that's a lot harder
    on Mac OS X than a configuration tab. (Some folks use this on Windows
    to run entirely out of a USB stick, for instance.) On the Mac you'd
    do it by editing either Info.plist or MRJApp.properties, I think. Not
    for the faint-hearted.

    So, you can get access to the save file pretty easily. But if you're
    looking for all the auxiliary files that get created, that's a harder
    problem.

  13. A. Unfortunately JBidwatcher doesn't cleanly support two different eBay
    accounts. There are tricksy ways to get it to work, but right now it's
    not really straightforward. It's one of the features I want to put into
    the next big version of JBidwatcher...

  14. A. Try downloading the Sun Java runtime, and pointing directly to it.

    In other words, if it installs to:
    /usr/java/jdk1.5.0_09
    you'd run JBidwatcher with:
    /usr/java/jdk1.5.0_09/bin/java -Xms256m -Xmx768m -jar JBidwatcher-1.0.jar

  15. A. It's inherited from Windows, but it can be configured... If you go
    into JBidwatcher's Configuration Manager (the two checkbox icon, or
    File | Configure), and go to 'advanced'.

    For the key, type in 'selection.color', and for the value, you type a
    hex representation of the color you want, in RRGGBB format. This
    might not mean anything to you, so here are two colors that might be
    good to start with:

    C6A646 for a slightly brown/tan-ish selection
    and
    999999 for a medium grey selection.

    Some outrageous ones are:
    cc0000 – bright red
    00cc00 – bright green
    0000cc – deep blue (probably even more unreadable)

    You could also use a web 'color picker' like:
     http://www.pagetutor.com/colorpicker/picker2/index.html
    and take the values out of the background box under the palette.

  16. A. It doesn't, unfortunately. For that, you have to figure out shipping
    using their tool, then set the shipping in the program (right-click
    (or control-click on a Mac) on the auction, and choose 'Set Shipping'.
    Once you've set the shipping cost, you can include it in a
    multisnipe, and it'll figure it out based on the number you set.

  17. A. It was a requested feature for multi-sniping... Mainly it means to
    subtract the shipping and insurance from the amount you enter. So,
    for example, if you want to pay a maximum of 50 *including* shipping
    and (if relevant) insurance, then you'd enter 50 in the snipe box, and
    check that note. All it does is subtract the shipping and insurance
    from the amount you enter. This isn't too useful in the case of a
    single auction, as you can calculate that for yourself.

    However, when multi-sniping, it's definitely useful as items can vary
    wildly in their shipping amounts.

    If the shipping changes after you've placed the snipe, the value will
    not adjust, it's a one-time setup.

  18. A. That's not a good sign, unfortunately. I'd try going to the eBay
    menu, and choosing 'Refresh eBay Session', or shutting down and
    restarting JBidwatcher, to see if it helps. But if JBidwatcher can't
    log into eBay, then it's not going to be able to snipe.

  19. A. JBidwatcher places the bid directly itself, rather than driving the
    browser, so no, you can leave your browser window closed if you'd
    like.

  20. A. If you right-click (or control-click ona Mac) on the tab names, you
    can create new tabs. Create any number of tabs, and you can select a
    set of items, right-click (or CTRL-Click) on the selected block of
    auctions, and choose 'Send to...', and you should be able to choose
    your new tab.

  21. A. Download the Sun Java runtime, because the GNU libgcj / gij
    version doesn't support a bunch of pieces of Java. I have no idea why
    the various Linux distros are shipping it as default (especially
    Redhat and Ubuntu), but it just doesn't work.

    Go to:
     http://java.sun.com/getjava

    Download the current version of Java, install it, and change your
    script to point directly to it, because otherwise the default version
    will continue to be used.

  22. A. In your Start Menu there's a section (under Programs, usually) named
    'Startup'. If you right-click the JBidwatcher icon, drag it to your
    Start Menu, wait for a moment (still holding the drag), it'll pop up
    the menu, and you can drag to Programs, then to Startup, and then
    finally drop it in the Startup folder. Because you did it with the
    right-click button, it'll prompt you to copy, move, or create a
    shortcut. Choose create shortcut, and a little icon of JBidwatcher
    should show up in there.

    Now it *should* startup automatically in the future. (Testing it
    would be prudent, but I understand not wanting to shut down your
    computer just to test.)

  23. A. Under 'Edit', it's 'Show/Hide Toolbar'.

  24. A. That's often a signal of a network issue; the red eye only shows up
    when it really can't get the pages from eBay at all. Sometimes this
    can mean eBay has removed the pages (mainly on mature audiences
    items), but usually it means that there's a problem connecting to
    eBay. (This also happens when eBay has their occasional maintenance,
    when you can't reach the pages.)

    Click refresh all (the little button with the two arrows pointing at
    each other) when you're sure you've got a good network connection, and
    see if it helps. You might also try shutting down and restarting
    JBidwatcher if you haven't already.

  25. A. Look in:
    /Users/{username}/.jbidwatcher

    There should be 'auctions.xml', and a number of backups (the last 5
    days, by date, and 5 hourly backups). First I'd suggest saving off
    that directory (I'm presuming you've gotten the data transferred onto
    a working drive), and then trying to copy the old auction files onto
    auctions.xml until you find one that works.

    If nothing else works, there's an 'auctionsave' directory, which
    contains archives of the HTML (and thumbnails) for each of the
    auctions it's seen (minus the deleted ones). It's possible in extreme
    circumstances to use that list of auction numbers to retrieve the
    original auctions if they're still on eBay, but that's really a
    desperation option more than anything else.

    User log in information is stored in 'JBidWatch.cfg', which
    unfortunately isn't backed up in multiple files like auctions.xml, but
    it can all be easily re-entered in the configuration manager.

  26. A. I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but it's sorting on a column
    which evidently doesn't have sane currency validation going on.

    The core answer, though, is to shutdown (force-quit if necessary)
    JBidwatcher, remove your display.cfg file and restart JBidwatcher.
    1. Shut down JBidwatcher.
    2. Bring up Terminal (it's usually in Applications/Utilities)
    3. Type:
      rm ~/.jbidwatcher/display.cfg
    4. Now start JBidwatcher again.
    It should launch okay, although you'll have lost window placement,
    size, and any custom columns you put in. (Sorry, that's all stored in
    display.cfg...)

  27. A. Yes. In fact, if you try to exit JBidwatcher when you have set a
    snipe to happen, it'll warn you about that.

    The JBidwatcher software places the bid directly with the eBay site,
    when it's time; in order for that to work, JBidwatcher needs to be
    running, and the computer needs to be on, and awake. Computers that
    automatically go to sleep in such a way as to shut down networking,
    and/or not let software continue running, will interfere with
    JBidwatcher's operation.

  28. A. JBidwatcher doesn't really do a very good job of doing currency
    conversion. It relies entirely on eBay's vision of currency
    conversion, and can only (more or less) convert between currencies
    that it's currently monitoring.

  29. A. Go to the configuration manager (the two checkbox icon, or File |
    Configure), and go to the 'Advanced' tab. Here you can enter:
    selection.color
    in the 'Configuration Key' box. Hit enter, and move to the
    'Configuration value' entry. Here you can enter a hex value for the
    color to use as the selection background. It uses the same format as
    HTML (RRGGBB), for what it's worth. The first two hex digits (0-F)
    are red, ranging from 00 as black to FF as bright red. The second two
    are similarly green, the last two are blue. For instance, C6A646 is
    the value I have as my selection color
    . (Actually, I have it set as
    my Windows-wide selection color via the Display Properties panel, but
    it works well on a per-app level also.)

    JBidwatcher uses the system selection color, unless overridden. If I
    were to change that to a different color as default, I would have far
    more complaints that it wasn't behaving in a system-appropriate manner
    than I have now about difficult-to-read lines. In the future I may
    make it easier to configure all the various colors, but for now
    the by-hand configuration is relatively straightforward.

  30. A. One of the major reasons I don't charge for JBidwatcher is
    that, unlike a spreadsheet which is entirely self-contained, it is
    ALWAYS possible for JBidwatcher to be broken arbitrarily (and maybe
    even permanently!) by matters entirely out of my and my users control.

    I'd feel REALLY bad if I took someone's money as a sale, and eBay
    went to captcha's for every login, for instance (to name a serious
    issue that many of my users are facing).

    I describe money people send me right now as donations, because if
    they send me anything at all, I want it to be on account of the help
    it has brought them in the past, and purely because they want to show
    their appreciation, not necessarily what it will bring them in the
    future. As they say in the financial industry, unfortunately:
    Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

  31. A. If a snipe is set, JBidwatcher always tries to bid at the end of the
    auction.

    If there are no other bids, JBidwatcher will still place a bid, and if
    nobody else bids against you, you will get the item at the sellers
    minimum bid price.

    If you are already the highest bidder, the bid placed at the end of
    the auction will not affect your existing high bid.

    There is an exception, for example if you bid $20, and some other user
    comes along later and bids $20, then you will be the high bidder as
    exact ties are resolved to the earliest bidder. If you come back and
    up your bid to $25 after that, for example via a snipe, then eBay
    consider you bidding against the other (later) bidder, and will
    ratchet up the bid to one minimum bid increment higher ($21, if I
    recall).

    Ties and near-ties are one of the more confusing parts for new eBay
    users, but in all other cases JBidwatcher's bid will not affect the
    current price if you are high bidder. (Not as true in Dutch auctions,
    but Dutch auctions are more complex in many ways.)

    An important feature I think you might have missed is the way eBays
    bid process works. It is a specific type of auction, a 'highest
    bidder, second price' auction.

    What this means is that the highest bidder always wins, but they only
    pay a price based on what the second-highest bidders price was. So if
    you bid $1000, but the next highest person bids $10, you'll only have
    to pay $10.50, which is one minimum bid over the 'second price'. This
    is not just true of sniping, but of the normal bidding process on eBay
    as well.

    This is why JBidwatcher doesn't need a lot of time at the end of the
    auction, to place lots of bids. It just places the one bid, your
    maximum, and lets the underlying system manage the 'second price'
    nature of it.

  32. A. 'FP' is 'Fixed Price'. The (0) means no bids as yet.

    The number in parenthesis is the count of bids so far. Since
    fixed-price items don't have bids, I show FP instead, for
    clarification. Or confusion, as it turns out. :)

  33. A. Right-click (control click under Mac OS X) on the tab name
    ('current'), and there's a 'Custom Columns' submenu. Off that is
    'Shipping', which is the amount registered in the listing for
    Shipping.

    If you want to, you can also choose 'Total', which is the current
    price plus the shipping amount. (A useful value to sort on...)

  34. A. Try right-clicking on the 'selling' tab itself, and you should get a
    context menu that includes 'custom columns' (where you can set the
    columns you want directly) and 'Properties', where you can choose the
    columns you want via checkboxes. There should be a 'high bidder'
    column available.

  35. A. No. JBidwatcher does NOT do that, because that would be counter to
    the point of sniping. Sniping is placing a SINGLE bid, once, at the
    end of the auction, for the maximum amount you're willing to pay. It
    does NOT keep you as the 'high bidder' of the auction all the way
    until the end, because that's an explicitly bad position to be in.
    It's a battle of knowledge. Every bid you place on-site exposes some
    knowledge about you, and what you're willing to pay, and what you're
    interested in. Sniping minimizes that information leakage by not even
    showing that you're interested in an item until the last seconds of
    the auction.

    Picture it this way, if you have a max of $50, an item is currently at
    $10, and you bid $11 to become the high bidder, and there's 3 days
    left, the other bidder can come back, bid $12, or $15, or $20. If,
    instead, you wait until there's 5 seconds left in the auction, and bid
    for $50, then by the time they get an 'outbid notice' in their email,
    the auction is already over, and you got it for $11, instead of going
    back and forth with other bidders.

    Now, if they had bid $65 originally, but the next highest bid (or the
    minimum bid) was around $10, the amount they have to pay will suddenly
    jump from $10 to $51, and they'll win it. Sniping works best against
    people who try to lowball prices, in which case it's their own fault.
    Sniping also works best if you put in what you are really willing to
    pay for an item, so that if it goes over that number, you can walk
    away comfortable that you wouldn't have been willing to pay that much
    for it anyway.

  36. A. Generally it's dependant on the speed of your net connection.

    I don't recommend dialup users set their snipe any faster than 15
    seconds, and recommend 20-30.

    Depending on your DSL and how loaded your connection is, you can
    probably go down to around 7-10 seconds.

    With JBidwatcher I've sniped at 1 second on a REALLY fast connection,
    but it was a corporate internet connection, lots of bandwidth,
    super-low-latency, and an item I wasn't too concerned about losing.

    I don't recommend anything near 1 second for home use; clock skew,
    other programs slowing the system down, random emails coming in, or
    any other internet traffic can make it so that a really close snipe
    fails.

    In fact, I generally advise against going closer than 5 seconds, and
    even that is VERY close, and any variation in your local network
    traffic or CPU availability can slow the snipe just enough to miss it.

    If you want to be relatively safe, stick with 10 seconds on the very
    fastest DSL lines, and increase it from there, capping out around
    20-30 seconds on a slow dial-up connection. DSL is lower-latency than
    cable, so cable should generally start around 15 seconds at the
    fastest.

    You'll notice that JBidwatcher loads some pages at about 2 minutes +
    the snipe time before the end. It's not actually sniping, it's
    preparing the bid page, so all it has to do is submit one page at the
    last moment, to complete the bid. This is tuned to go as fast as it
    can.

    All that said, sometimes eBay flubs a page-load, and doesn't respond,
    hanging the connection for 10-20 seconds, before it times out. When
    that happens, there's nothing to do. It's why JBidwatcher can't
    guarantee it'll successfully snipe; the variation of things that can
    go wrong is far too large. It tries its best, though.

  37. A. If you go into the Configuration Manager, into the
    'advanced' section, and enter in:
    display.thumbnail
    and set the value to
    false
    it won't display thumbnails anymore. (Right-clicking, and choosing
    'Show Info' will show it, although it still might have issues with
    really large images.)

  38. A. You can configure the double-click action to be 'Show in browser' in
    the 'General' tab of JBidwatcher's Configuration Manager. Lots of Mac
    OS X users do that, for instance. At that point you can double-click
    on the item, and it'll pop up a browser window.

  39. A. Unfortunately under OS/2 it doesn't know how to look for the 'default' browser. :(

    Try this:
      Go to Configuration Manager (File | Configure)
      Go to the Advanced tab
      Type:
        browser.launch.OS/2
    for the 'Configuration Key', and enter the path to launch your chosen browser in the
    'Configuration Value' field.

    Click 'Set', and 'Save'. You shouldn't need to restart JBidwatcher, but you might.
    This *should* work, but not having OS/2 to test with, I can't be certain.

  40. A. This is an extension of the OS/2 issue above...

    The key is to figure out what the operating system name is, according
    to Java. The property is 'os.name', and JBidwatcher only uses the first
    part, cutting it off at any spaces that might be in the name. One
    source for this is the 'What os or arch value can I use?' list.

    So on that list, you'd see the 'os' field for OS/2 being just OS/2, so
    you'd understand why the previous answer gives 'OS/2' as the part to put
    at the end of:
    browser.launch.OS/2
    but for Irix the configuration
    key would be:
    browser.launch.Irix
    The configuration key is just whatever the local operating system path
    to your favorite browser is.

  41. A. JBidwatcher does a LOT of internal work to try and understand what your
    network delay to eBay is, and takes that into account when placing a snipe.
    So for instance, if you set 10 seconds, and JBidwatcher determines that
    you have a 2-3 second lag time to eBay, it'll start sending the
    confirmation form at 12-13 seconds before the auction ends.

    Since it logs in and preps the bid at 2 minutes prior to end, and there's
    only one page that needs to be submitted for the actual bid, this works out
    pretty well.

    Setting the number of seconds from the end to snipe should be how much
    buffer you want, really. If you're on dial-up, the latency variation is
    higher, so you want to set your snipe timer higher (like 20-30 seconds),
    just to absorb that potential variation. If you're on Cable, you have less
    variation, but still pretty high, so you might want to set your snipe timer
    to 15-20 seconds. If you're on DSL or an equivalent, it's usually a pretty
    predictable latency (barring BitTorrent or other bandwidth-hoggers), so you
    can go down to 10-15 seconds. If you're on a corporate network, and it's
    usually not saturated, you can get away with lower numbers even still.

    But fundamentally, JBidwatcher tries REALLY hard to measure your latency,
    and add that latency in to when it starts the actual snipe.

  42. A. If you downloaded from SourceForge, it may be an html file with a list of
    mirror sites. Be careful to follow the directions, or download directly
    from the main site:
      http://www.jbidwatcher.com

  43. A. Just make a copy of the .jbidwatcher directory in your home directory.

    On Windows it's usually:
    C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\.jbidwatcher
    On the Mac it's at:
    /Users/{username}/.jbidwatcher
    but you can't use the Finder to see it, you have to get to it from the Terminal.
    On Linux, it's just:
    ~/.jbidwatcher

    For Linux and Mac OS X (from the Terminal), you can just go:
    cp -aRv ~/.jbidwatcher ~/jbidwatcher_backup
    On Windows, just hold down Ctrl and drag the .jbidwatcher directory either to another directory,
    or to a free spot in that directory. It will create 'Copy of .jbidwatcher',
    which you can rename or do what you'd like with.

  44. A. Okay, this isn't really a question people ask, but don't forget to look
    inside JBidwatcher's own Help menu for the in-program FAQ! It's got a
    lot of useful stuff about normal usage of the program, and some advanced
    hints.

-- Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!