Snippy's

Snipe it... Win it!

Recent updates

Snippy's: Occasionally slow website Posted on Wednesday, May 19, 2010 by Brezhonneg

Our web site may become very slow or even totally unresponsive for short periods of time. If you cannot browse our website normally, please give it a try a few moments later.

Our technical team has been alerted and is investigating the cause.

Please note that our sniper is not located on the same servers as our website. Therefore, bid placement should remain fully operational.

We are really sorry for the inconvenience this problem will cause. We thank you in advance for your kind understanding.

Best regards,

The Snippy's team

Snippy's: Back to normal Posted on Friday, December 11, 2009 by Brezhonneg

Dear Snippy's users,

The network issues were gradually solved within a few hours. Everything is now working perfectly well again.

Thank you all for your patience.

Best regards,

The Snippy's team

Snippy's: sniper and website issues last night Posted on Thursday, December 10, 2009 by Brezhonneg

Dear Snippy's users,

Snippy's main server has had network issues over the last hours. Our hosting service provider is alerted about this problem and is working on a resolution.

As a consequence of this situation, you may have experienced problems browsing Snippy's website or connecting to your Snippy's account.

On the sniper front, a few "Bid placed after the end of the sale" mail reports have been sent out. Fortunately, most of them were inaccurate. Snippy's is pessimistic by nature. When it is unsure about a mission outcome, it always assumes the worst. These inaccuracies have been checked and manually corrected, so that the right outcome should appear in your mission control center.

We are very sorry for the inconvenience caused by this technical problem. We thank you in advance for your understanding and your patience while these issues are being worked on.

Best regards,

The Snippy's team

Snippy's: Delcampe issues 3 Posted on Thursday, September 24, 2009 by Brezhonneg

The saga continues...

We now have more information about what actually happened yesterday.

Delcampe put in place a new secured connexion process. We quickly adapted Snippy's to this new connexion process. However, the Delcampe team must have decided that this enhancement was not quite ready for the show and later switched back to the previous connexion process. By the time we modified Snippy's again, quite a few missions failed because Snippy's could not connect properly to the bidder accounts.

Snippy's works correctly at this time. However, these changes on the Delcampe site seem to indicate that more changes and instabilities are to be expected soon. We will do our best to react as fast as we can, and to keep Snippy's compatible. Because of this situation, we cannot guarantee the stability and safety of your bid placements until things have settled down on the Delcampe site, so prudence is advised.

We count on your patience and on your kind understanding. Feel free to contact us should you need further information about the situation.

Best regards,

The Snippy's team

Snippy's: Delcampe issues 2 Posted on Wednesday, September 23, 2009 by Brezhonneg

Dear all,

After further investigation, it turned out that most of the problems that Snippy's has had with Delcampe over the last few hours are caused by some big changes on the Delcampe website. The account login process and the overall cookies management has been changed dramatically on their site. This led to major issues with our sniper, and several missions were missed because of this.

We are actively working on resolving these issues as quick as humanely possible. We will keep posting here about the evolutions of this work.

Please note that these problems have absolutely no influence on the eBay sniper, which is still working perfectly well.

We thank you in advance for your patience and your understanding.

Best regards,

The Snippy's team

Snippy's: Delcampe issues Posted on Wednesday, September 23, 2009 by Brezhonneg

Hi,

The Delcampe website seems to have quite a few issues at the moment, as mentioned on their news page and their forums.

Here is a brief summary of the problems you can currently expect when browsing the Delcampe website:

- slow response time

- some item pages randomly report that the sale does not exist anymore

- some difficulties logging into your Delcampe account

These problems seem to occur randomly. As you might imagine, they will affect our sniper just as much as they affect you. Missions registrations, accounts set up and probably snipes can be problematic at times.

We have no doubts that the Delcampe team will do their best to resolve these issues. In the mean time, there is not much that we can do to work around these issues. We are very sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Best regards,

The Snippy's team

Snippy's: [UPDATED] Intermittent issues Posted on Friday, June 12, 2009 by Brezhonneg

Dear all,

The hosting company that is hosting our master servers reports intermittent connectivity issues due to hardware related problems. Unfortunately for us, intermittent connectivity issues means intermittent loss of snipe accuracy. We expect the situation to be back to normal by the end of this weekend.

We do know how important an accurate timing is for your bid placement, and we are very sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Thank you for your understanding.

Happy bidding,

The Snippy's team

UPDATE: The issue was resolved way ahead of schedule and our sniper accuracy was restored and back to normal as early as Saturday morning. Thank you for your patience.

Snippy's: Delcampe sniper patched Posted on Saturday, May 09, 2009 by Brezhonneg

Dear all,

It became quite clear that the intermittent failures that our Delcampe sniper has been experiencing were actually caused by permanent changes on Delcampe's end. Therefore, we decided to apply a patch to our sniper to take these changes into account.

This is still a work in progress, but the situation has dramatically improved. We are fairly confident in our patched sniper, as the last few missions were completely successful. However, reliability can only be assessed after a certain period of time, so we will keep polishing our adjustments if needed.

We thank you all for your patience and understanding. Rest assured that we are doing everything that can be done to minimize the impact of those Delcampe changes on your missions.

Happy bidding,

The Snippy's team

Snippy's: Delcampe situation update Posted on Thursday, May 07, 2009 by Brezhonneg

Dear all,

There has been no more mission failures since the update of our last news post.

It is hard to say if things are now permanently stabilized at the Delcampe end. Things are looking good so far, but rest assured that we keep monitoring the situation pretty closely.

Happy bidding,

The Snippy's team

Snippy's: [UPDATED] Troubles with Delcampe Posted on Wednesday, May 06, 2009 by Brezhonneg

Dear all,

It seems that the Delcampe team updated their website yesterday. According to their French forum, this update raised a series of issues. Namely, the pictures handling and the ability of placing bids have been compromised.

As a direct result, our Delcampe sniper has not been able to place any bid on their site between 2PM and 10PM GMT. All the missions that were supposed to be completed during that period failed. Note that it seems that a manual bid placement would also have been difficult, if not impossible.

Everything is apparently back to normal now, at least for the bid placement functionality. Missions scheduled after 10PM GMT completed successfully.

We are extremely sorry for the failed missions. Rest assure that we are going to focus our attention on this situation over the next hours. Please note that this does not compromise our eBay sniper efficiency in any way.

Best regards,

The Snippy's team

Update:

A few missions have failed this morning. It is impossible to tell if this is caused by intermittent failures on Delcampe servers, or if this is related to experiments that will lead to permanent changes on their site. In any event, we cannot take appropriate measures until the situation has settled. For the time being, we invite you to be cautious with your Delcampe missions. We will make sure to keep you updated on a regular basis.

Snippy's: Yez sniper suspended Posted on Wednesday, April 01, 2009 by Brezhonneg

Hi all,

Yez auction site gets a new layout and a new name. Our sniper is therefore suspended, the time for us to make the necessary tweaking.

Needless to say that this does not affect our eBay sniper or our Delcampe sniper in any way.

Best regards,

The Snippy's team

Snippy's: And here is 2009 Posted on Thursday, January 01, 2009 by Brezhonneg

Dear all,

2008 fades away. I hope you enjoyed it, because all the newspapers seem to agree on the fact that no matter where you are and no matter what you do, 2009 will be worse.

Lies, all lies I tell you. There are always many reasons to rejoice, but they never make the headlines. Probably they do not sell as much...

2008 was a great year for Snippy's. The new site version that was put online exactly one year ago helped us reach maturity. 2009 will be even better. We do have a lot of exiting projects being worked on, to make our service better, faster, stronger. In a word, the best (*gingle*).

On behalf of the Snippy's team, I would like to wish you all a very happy new year.

Snippy's: Delcampe sniper Posted on Monday, November 17, 2008 by Brezhonneg

Dear users,

The situation has not really improved since our last news post on the Delcampe issue a month ago. The Delcampe website is still regularly overloaded, and users are reporting their inability to manually place bids at certain peak hours on the Delcampe forum.

The Delcampe erratic response time is also a problem for Snippy's. We have to walk down a thin line to find a good balance between bid placement accuracy and security. Most of the time, we have to add a safety margin to your mission buffer in prevision of Delcampe sudden slowdowns. This explains why many bids are placed a few seconds in advance. In rare occasions, Delcampe virtually stops responding and the margin Snippy's used becomes too small, leading to late bid placements. This still occurs very rarely, but is unfortunately not avoidable given the circumstances.

We are constantly monitoring the situation, to adjust our sniping algorithm if needed. We firmly believe that our automated bid placement process is still a lot more efficient than manual 'click and pray' bid placement, especially at peak hours.

Please kindly note that this situation does not affect our other snipers (eBay, Yez) in any way.

Happy bidding!

Snippy's: Minor changes Posted on Monday, November 03, 2008 by Brezhonneg

Hi all,

A few fixes have been applied to the 'My Account' page. This should get rid of a couple of minor glitches. That page should now be properly displayed in the Opera browser, and the forum avatar section should be operational in Internet Explorer (any version).

Please do not hesitate to report any annoyance (a.k.a. bug) on this page or on any other page for that matter.

Happy bidding!

Snippy's: Improved security Posted on Tuesday, October 21, 2008 by Brezhonneg

Hi all,

Because we always have the safety of your private data in mind, we decided to improve our site security policy. On top of all the security procedures already in place, an encrypted protocol (HTTPS) will now be enforced on the account page. Since this is a page where you provide your bidding account credentials, an even tighter security can do no harm there...

Happy bidding!

The Snippy's team

Snippy's: Free Yez sniper Posted on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 by Brezhonneg

Hi all,

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of our new sniper. It will target the yezzz auction site (http://www.yezzz.com). To celebrate this new release, every yezzz mission that is completed before the end of this month (October) will be absolutely free of charge.

We hope you will enjoy this new opportunity to win even more auctions!

Happy bidding,

The Snippy's team

Snippy's: Delcampe bids Posted on Sunday, October 12, 2008 by Brezhonneg

Hi all,

As acknowledged by the Delcampe administrators (see Delcampe news), their site has been having some access issues lately. These issues lead to unexpected and rapid slowdowns, which affect our sniper bid placement. Even though a huge majority of the bids are still placed successfully, a very few of them, mostly at peak hours, can be placed too late (less than 5%) or even missed (less than 1%). This happens when the speed variations at Delcampe are too sudden to be anticipated by Snippy's.

We trust Delcampe tech team to resolve these issues at their end in the next few days. Meanwhile, we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused. We do hope that you understand the situation here. Please note that this does not affect our eBay sniper in any ways.

Thank you for your kind understanding,

The Snippy's team

Snippy's: Sniper statistics Posted on Tuesday, October 07, 2008 by Brezhonneg

Hi all,

Our FAQ page has been completely updated, in an attempt to provide more user-friendly answers to the most commonly asked questions.

Among the new information that you can read there, you might find our snipers statistics of particular interest. They provide you with accurate, daily updated graphs of our snipers accuracy. We believe this information can be a precious asset for you to determine what is the perfect buffer for your snipes.

Here they are: http://www.snippys.net/FAQ.aspx#Q31

Feel free to contact us if you have any question about this new information - or any other topic. The usual channels are still wide open: contact page, e-mail or the forum.

Happy bidding,

The Snippy's team

Snippy's: New billing policy Posted on Thursday, September 25, 2008 by Brezhonneg

Dear users,

A new condition was recently added for a mission to be charged by Snippy's. From now on, a mission will be charged only if:

1/ You win the sale

2/ Snippy's correctly placed your bid

and

3/ The object final price is not higher than the bid placed by Snippy's

This last condition ensures that you are not charged if Snippy's bid was not high enough to win the sale and you finished the job by placing higher bids manually.

This new billing policy is the result of concerns expressed in the forum or by e-mail. We will always do our best to respond positively to your remarks and suggestions, and to address any issue you may have. So feel free to contact us if you have any question regarding this new billing policy or anything else.

Best regards,

The Snippy's team

Snippy's: New Terms and conditions Posted on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 by Brezhonneg

Dear users,

New Terms and conditions have been published on our website. Please make sure to read them. Feel free to contact us should you have any concern or question regarding them.

Best regards,

The Snippy's team

Snippy's: [Resolved] Mail problems Posted on Saturday, May 03, 2008 by Brezhonneg

Dear users,

This problem has been resolved. We thank you for your patience.

The Snippy's team

Snippy's: Site upgrade Posted on Friday, May 02, 2008 by Brezhonneg

Dear users,

Our website has just been upgraded. Most of the changes are not very visible. They tend to improve the pages performance, in terms of download speed and execution speed. However, a few of them are bug fixes or responses to your demands:

- Quite a few forum bugs have been fixed

- Lost forum messages should be restored after a timeout logout

- Paid Snippies are now mentioned in the finished missions table

- A link has been added to the objects pictures

- Canceled missions for which the sale is not closed yet are now listed apart so that they can be restored easily

- Your session timeout is now customizable. Before that, the site would ask you to enter your password after 30 minutes of inactivity. You can now adjust this delay to better fit your needs.

- The site language is now easily switchable with the little flag in the upper right corner

- Delcampe objects images are back in the control center

- Avatar picture customization is now back (except for Internet Explorer users)

- and a few more...

Like with every upgrade, and despite all our efforts to prevent this, it is very possible that new bugs eventually show up. Please make sure to report them to us, either by e-mail or on the forum.

Best regards,

The Snippy's team

Snippy's: Strategy adjustments Posted on Friday, February 29, 2008 by Brezhonneg

Hi all,

Following the recent glitches, we decided to tweak the sniper settings. From now on, bid placement strategy will follow a 'better be safe than sorry' motto.

Bid accuracy will not be affected under 'normal' circumstances, that is to say when the auction site has a stable reactivity. In such a case, you should still get a one second accuracy on your snipes. However, when fluctuations in response time are detected, Snippy's will make sure that your bid is placed, even if that means it is placed a few seconds ahead of schedule.

These new settings are in effect since last Monday. Practically, no change has been observed in the bid placement accuracy on eBay. This is because their servers are reliably and consistently reactive. On Delcampe, most bids are still placed at the exact time. However, a few of them are placed in advance, with a safety margin that is proportional to the measured reactivity fluctuations. Luckily, those fluctuations are still minor and limited in time.

For now, things are looking good, and we are still gathering data on the effect of this new strategy before fine-tuning our settings even further. You can already take this new strategy into account for your next missions. This is especially true for the last seconds snipe users.

Happy bidding!

Delcampe: More Delcampe alerts Posted on Tuesday, February 19, 2008 by Brezhonneg

Hi all,

Snippy has had difficulties reaching Delcampe sites these last few days. This is most probably due to the Delcampe servers being occasionally slow and/or unresponsive. Most of the time, the sniper managed to compensate for the slow reactivity, but a few low buffer missions were border line or failed.

Late snipe users are therefore advised to push their buffer up a notch if they want to stand on the safe side...

Snippy's: Control center upgrade Posted on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 by Brezhonneg

Hi all,

Thanks to your kind remarks and suggestions, numerous improvements were made on the mission control center:

- Links to the auction page and seller page are more visible;

- You can now set your time zone, so that sale start and end dates are expressed in your time zone;

- Missions tables now show the account used to big if you have more than one account registered

- Navigation in the missions tables can now be done with the keyboard and even with the mouse wheel;

- The whole page has been optimized for a faster download.

Many more improvements are in the pipe, but feel free to keep the suggestions coming!

Snippy

Snippy's: Resolved issue Posted on Thursday, January 03, 2008 by Brezhonneg

The issue with the eBay bid placement engine should now be resolved. We thank you very much for your patience.

Snippy's: Sniper intermittent failures Posted on Wednesday, January 02, 2008 by Brezhonneg

Dear users,

Our bid placement engine has had intermittent failures since the release of the new site version (which includes a new sniper too). These failures primarily affect eBay, and a few missions failed with the 'bid placed after the end of the sale' outcome.

We are working on this to resolve the issue as soon as possible, and are very sorry for the losses. We thank you in advance for your patience.

Best regards,

The Snippy's team

Snippy's: A new Snippy's site Posted on Monday, December 31, 2007 by Brezhonneg

Dear Snippy's users,

Like if there were not enough excuses to celebrate these days, Snippy's is one year old. For this occasion, it was decided to take your Snippy experience one step further, and to release the new version of Snippy's site. So, here it is!

This new version comes with an improved interface. Nicer and cleaner, we believe it will also make the use of your favorite site a lot more straight forward.

To capitalize on our one year long experience, we also carried out some major improvements under the hood. Snippy's is now more flexible, thanks to the extra features provided, including fully customizable alert settings. Those engine-level changes also offer a promise of an improved safety, an even better accuracy and an easier expandability.

Of course, those improvements have a cost: they are going to break some of your habits. However, we are confident that you will soon get used to those evolutions and to the ease of use they provide. For more information concerning the transition, please visit the howto section of our forum.

Finally, the Snippy's team would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the Snippy's users. Snippy's would be nothing without your commitment and your invaluable support.

Very happy holiday season to all of you, and happy new year.

Delcampe: Back to normal Posted on Monday, November 19, 2007 by Brezhonneg

Hi all,

It seems the Delcampe team has sorted out the bid order problem we were mentioning in our previous news post. Snippy's has been able to successfully place bids on Delcampe with the normal +/-1 second accuracy most of the time over the last 2 weeks.

Using a small buffer is always risky. With that in mind, it seems reasonably safe to lower your buffers back to what they used to be.

Happy bidding!

Delcampe: Higher buffers suggested Posted on Wednesday, October 31, 2007 by Brezhonneg

We are experiencing a lot of missed missions on Delcampe these days. This message is intended to describe our analyze of the situation, as well as possible adjustments you can do.

** The situation **

While Delcampe servers performance has dramatically improved lately, we seem to observe a side effect to the software tweaking they have been doing. The time required to process a bid order became erratic. Our logs show peak hours, at which the bid processing time can fluctuate a lot and becomes unpredictable.

If you choose a buffer time of 5 seconds and Delcampe servers take 10s to process the bid order sent by Snippy's, the bid will be taken into account too late.

** What Snippy's does for you **

Under 'normal' conditions, Snippy's estimates the processing time and places the bid ahead, to compensate. This works very well with eBay (we are down to the 1s accuracy), and used to be efficient with Delcampe. During those peak hours I mentioned, with such an erratic processing time, there is not much that can be done...

** What you could do **

So, to make a long story short, our suggestion is to use a bigger buffer for Delcampe, until they resolve this issue. You could try to push it up to 30 sec for instance, and then decrease it little by little. From what we can observe, 20s seems to be quite safe, even on peak hours. Of course this depends more on Delcampe servers than on ours, so we cannot guarantee any buffer to be 100% safe at any hour.

Happy bidding!

Snippy's: End of the free period Posted on Tuesday, January 30, 2007 by Brezhonneg

Dear testers,

As announced, the free period for Snippy's is coming to its end in a few hours.

Thanks to you, our service has been continuously improved based on your feed-back. In order to show you our gratitude, the Snippy's team will give you 1 Snippy for every mission registered up to now. Like every newly registered user, you will also get 5 free Snippies. Those of you who went ahead and bought Snippies from the site will of course keep them all on top of the others.

Needless to say that we are more than ever listening to your suggestions. You can always contact us, either on this forum or via e-mail.

Very happy bidding to all of you,

The Snippy's team

Snippy's: Free period extended in January 2007 Posted on Friday, January 05, 2007 by Brezhonneg

First of all, the Snippy's team joins me to wish you all all the best for 2007!

2006 has been an excellent year for Snippy's. The initial development stage is well behind, and the accuracy and reliability of our service is now established. Of course 2007 is even more promizing, with a lot of new features and improvements in the pipe! Based on our testers feedback, we will mainly focus on making Snippy's even more user-friendly by following the leads that they suggested. More auctions sites will also join the party, so that you can be sure to get the best bargains ever on the net. So watch out for these improvements and a lot more.

What more, Snippy's will still be free in January! We need this time to let everybody know about Snippy's and to gain popularity. Also the coming improvements will still require a few adjustments under the hood, so we count on you users to report any glitch you may find. Since we ask you to work, we did not feel like making you pay on top of it ;-)

Once again, the Snippy's team wishes you a year full of winning bids!

Snippy's: Free beta extended until December 2006 Posted on Tuesday, October 17, 2006 by Brezhonneg

Dear Snippy testers,

The administrators would like to warmly thank you for your testing, and more importantly, for your help and support. Thank to you and your reports and feedback, we have been able to hunt down a fair chunk of annoying glitches and to improve the existing features. We believe that Snippy's has now reached a level of usability and efficiency that should meet the average bidder expectations.

There are however several reasons that made us extend the beta phase. The first of them is that despite the Delcampe and eBay sites have been tested quite a lot, Yahoo! auctions seems to not be very popular, and could still use some testing. The second reason is that we would like to see how Snippy's behaves as more and more people use it. A free experience is probably what will bring those extra users to us.

Anyways, the bottom line is that Snippy's will remain free till December 2006. Feel free to keep reporting the problems and to send us your suggestions for improvements, as this is the surest way for you to make Snippy's an even better service.

The Snippy's team.