RF Generation Message Board

Software Publisher's Description
The best way to find bargains on eBay! AuctionSieve helps you rapidly filter through the auctions in ebay searches or categories. Especially designed for collectors, the quick, easy to use interface helps you exclude the stuff you're not interested in and target items of real value. Save an unlimited number of searches. Combine search results. Sort results instantly. Create an unlimited number of trash words for your searches just by highlighting what you don't want - no typing involved! Sort auction results by 'catch words' to help spot hidden bargains. Add to an unlimited Watchlist. Keep ended watchlist items forever in a Price History table. Best of all, it's free, with no ads or spyware! Visit the website for mac/java/linux versions.
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of course, I appreciate that many  titles on eBay , are incorrectly listed, or not listed at all, just a photo of a pile of games. Anyway, below is a copy/paste of part of the e-mail conversation I had with the programmes author

>> BTW How did you find out about AuctionSieve?
>>
>
>
> I found out about aution seive, by searching the available downloads (freeware)
> at www.zdnet.com for auction tools.
>
>
> For an idea of the task that we are underataking at W.O.S check this link;
> http://www.worldofspectrum.org/mia.html
> (it that does not work, jump to the MIA link through the main page).
>
>
> Perphaps I was too hasty to dismiss your programme?
>
> The task is, every day, to check the Sinclair sub-category of eBay, for
> the thousands of titles, in the Missing In Action list, and to then
> manually investigate each one of those auctions, for closer inspection,
> whilst dismissing all the other result which do not match our search
> criteria. It's taken 9 years to archive 6,500 titles. I've only just joined
> the MIA auction tracking team..
>
> Do you think that this is viable, with your software?
>
> thanks
> Mark


Hi Mark,

That is so cool! Ah if only I had more time to play all those old games.
That's some serious info you've got there - I'm especially impressed
that you even have jpgs of the ads!

What you want to do is exactly the kind of thing I wrote AuctionSieve for.
I'm interested in old Dungeons & Dragons and I used to trawl through the
pages of auctions in the D&D category manually. There was a whole bunch
of stuff I just wasn't interested in and started writing code to automate
the trashing of all those auctions so I wouldn't have to see them.

So in your case here's what you could do :
Create a new Sieve (File->New Sieve...)
Choose Get auctions 'from an eBay category'
Click on Choose...
Drill down to the Sinclair category
Hit Ok and Ok again
Click Get Auctions!

Now, once the results appear (may take a few minutes), you can highlight
words in the auction titles. For example, looking at the current results
I can see an auction for :
Heroes of the lance (ad & d ssl 1988 - spectrum)
Now this is *not* MIA, so we can highlight "heroes of the lance" and then click
on 'Add to Trash words'. Instantly that auction and any other auctions which
have "heroes of the lance" in the title will disappear from your results.

The great thing is that you will never see any auctions for "heroes of the lance"
*ever again*. And because it takes about 2 seconds to highlight some words
and add to trash, it's super easy to quickly build up a huge trash list.

Also, when you come back tomorrow and run the program again, you can turn on
the "Ignore auctions already seen" filter and you won't have to go through
the auctions you already went through yesterday.

You can also create catch words to group certain auctions together. For example
you could create a catch word "advance to mayfair". The results are ordered
according to the order of the catch words in the list on the left so if you
had this catch word up the top, you'd see any auction for this straight away
at the top of your results. If there were, say, 3 of those auctions you could
click 'View All' and AuctionSieve would fire up the 3 necessary browser windows.

I think you'll be really missing out on a lot of benefits and time savings if you
don't give it at least a bit of a go.

Nev
There is a way you can quickly add trash words.
Go to the directory where you installed AuctionSieve and you'll see
some files with a .sieve ending. These are the configuration files.
If you've only set up one sieve you'll see 1.trash.sieve.
Open that up in notepad and you'll see it's just the list of
trash words - one per line. Just copy and paste from your other file!

Also, in the sieves I run, I have the word "lot" as a catch word up
the top of my list - that way those types of auctions (which often
have the bargains) are grouped together and I can quickly open them all up.

I've got a huge list of features to add and from your initial reaction
of feeling overwhelmed it appears I still have a lot to do to help
the first time user. Have you got any suggestions on how I could improve

http://downloads-zdnet.com.com/AuctionSieve/3000-6905_2-10332421.html?tag=lst-0-13

Hmmm, seems like it would be pretty useful.

It is pretty good actually, for instance, I can copy/paste my megadrive collection into the prog. and then filter them out from any new searches. :)

damn, where was that when I was an ebay junkie?

I will have to give this a try.

Awww man. I was doing my super dee duper speed reading thing that doesn't work and always gets me into trouble and I thought you were auctioning off an albainian sex slave.