Personally I believe the claim of violation of the UA is a grey area. You are not taking anything away from eBay's profits, plus providing the refresh rates are at reasonable levels and you are only scraping text, then the demand on eBay's servers is a hellva lot lower than a web browser.

eBay makes their money through someone submitting an auction item and the final sale value. The web browsing side of things is free. Any advertising is generally done by the person who auctions the item in the first place. The two other pieces of advertising are for eBay owned companies, which are generally used by buyers and sellers in monetary transactions anyway. If they were obtaining their funding through high levels of advertising then yes, I could be persuaded to think these kinds of scripts were harming their business. As it is, they don't.

Up until earlier this year I had been attempting to provide a Perl variant of AuctionPal, which alas is no longer supported. As every eBay site is different in terms of layout, language and currency, its a big task. Once I had got a working version my plan was to then learn Gtk and write a nice GUI. I still plan to finish it, but it may be sometime coming.

The fact that AuctionPal was widely used and never prosecuted or warned off, inclines me to think as long as you don't abuse their services, eBay are happy for you to check when your bid has been surpassed so you can make a higher one, and thus increase their profits :)

I had some communication with the writer of AuctionPal towards it's end, having made several suggestions for improvement. Unfortunately, due to eBay's growing number of country specific websites it made it difficult for him to keep up, particularly regarding languages and currencies. This was one of the reasons I want to write an Open Source Perl version.

--
Barbie | Birmingham Perl Mongers | http://birmingham.pm.org/

In reply to Re: Re: ebay item watcher by barbie
in thread ebay item watcher by eweaverp

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