Author: rhyswynne

Today, we've made the very difficult decision to remove the free tier of Auction Request, as well as disable link cloaking and geotargeting for Premium users. Whilst not a decision we wanted to take, it's unfortunately necessary in order to preserve the integrity of the services we offer.

The Free Tier Explained

Up to this point, we've allowed free users to use Auction Request to list their auctions, but in return we would add our affiliate code to the links. The income from this, while relatively small, justified the server resources allocated to it, and also served as an extended "free trial" of Auction Request. In order to prevent free users from changing our ePN campaign ID to theirs, we routed their links through Auction Request's servers. So a link to auctionrequest.com/ap.php?uid=sampleuser&itemid=1234567890, for example, would arrive at our server, we'd compose the appropriate eBay rover URL, and then append our campaign ID to it. The click would then be forwarded to eBay to view the item in question. Technically speaking, this was accomplished via a 301 server redirect, so eBay should have (correctly) seen that the click was made from sampleuser's website.

What Happened?

A couple of weeks ago, we were contacted by ePN to state they wanted to investigate how we were generating traffic. We explained the situation to them, and provided the data they requested — the websites using our free tier. Unfortunately, a few days ago they responded to say that they believed Auction Request was generating "non bona-fide transactions" and that our ePN account was immediately terminated. While we did no such thing, we were not allowed any chance to fix it, nor did ePN provide us any specifics on what they saw as "non bona-fide". All of our free-tier clicks? Just some of them? Did this just start? Etc.

So, without knowing anything more about what the central issue is, we've come to the conclusion it must be one of two things: 1) routing clicks through our server, even with a 301 redirect, is either obscuring the source of the click to eBay, or introduces the possibility that we might be illegally generating false clicks. 2) One of our users is generating false clicks, which when routed through Auction Request's server and our campaign ID attached, becomes Auction Request's problem.

Again, without knowing specifics on what eBay has an issue with, or giving us a chance to fix it, we're left to conclude that we cannot process clicks through our server. Therefore, effective yesterday, all link cloaking (and the associated ability to geotrack) has been disabled. Premium users will see their rover links pointing straight to eBay (many of you may already be doing this, so you won't see any change). The links will not geotrack, as ePN does not natively support this ability. Additionally, displaying affiliate links on your website runs the risk of the "Google hammer"; your mileage may vary. While this all sucks (to put it bluntly), we don't want to risk any clients being targeted by ePN for suspicion of "non bona-fide transactions".

As far as the Free tier goes, without any income from our campaign ID attached to those links, we unfortunately can't justify providing server resources for feeds that nobody's making any affiliate income off of. Combined with the inability to prevent free users from adding their own campaign ID and circumventing our subscription plan, this makes the Free tier unviable going forward.

Summary of Changes

• We have switched off the Free tier – Emails are going out shortly to all free users encouraging them to switch to a Premium tier. They'll get the standard 14-day free trial to see how it works for them. The free tier is now no more, unless ePN allows us to restart it.
• Removal of Link Cloaking and Geotargeting – We suspect link cloaking was the problem. We've switched off link cloaking so all rover links now go directly to eBay. We invite representatives from eBay to review our code to see that what we were doing was above board, but if past experience is any indication, they are unlikely to take us up on this.
• Raised Prices – With the double-whammy of the loss of affiliate income, plus the costs of the new dedicated server we obtained last month, we're unfortunately forced to raise subscription rates in order to keep the lights on. If you are currently on a Premium tier subscription your rate will remain the same, but all new subscriptions or upgrades will be at the rate of $12/month or $120/year. The new rates will go into effect in two weeks, on February 7, in order to allow current Free tier members to subscribe under the old rates.

As always, please contact us directly for any questions you may have.

Since one of us here at Auction Request also created WP eBay Product Feeds, it makes sense that the plugin and this site do tend to work well with each other. It's this cooperation that has lead to a new tool – our WP eBay Product Feeds – Extra Spam Checker helper plugin.

This plugin, designed for WordPress, improves the spambot checking that currently exists inside WP eBay Product Feeds. It pings external servers to check if the traffic is a bot, and if it is, your listings are hidden. (It has to be in a separate plugin, rather than embedded into WP eBay Product Feeds, as WordPress.org's repository doesn't allow pinging external sources).

We've been testing this plugin with some of our heavier users who use WP eBay Product Feeds, and it seems to work well, so we're offering it up to everybody now.

Visit the WP eBay Product Feeds – Extra Spam Checker page on this site for more details, instructions on how to use the plugin, and how you can help us, or alternatively please click this button to download the plugin.

Hi Everybody,

As you are no doubt aware, we had some quite significant downtime this week. This blog post will hopefully explain the situation and what we'll do to mitigate these issues in the future.

What Happened?

On 7th September, roughly 7pm UK time, our host provider (Hostinger) began noticing a problem with the US datacenter that Auction Request is located on. We had a hardware component failure.

This resulted in the site going down and everything associated with it (everything is hosted through there, so we lost email & pings were resulting in the server hanging). After speaking with Scott (which in itself was tricky due to a lack of email not hosted via Auction Request), we found out – unfortunately – at the time – there was very little we could do, with no real way of communicating with users via official channels.

We resorted to unofficial channels where we hoped to reach a large proportion of our customers, to spread the message and to and manage expectations. I sent out a message to users of my plugin – WP eBay Product Feeds (including emailing all known active customers), and Scott put messages on a PHPBay Facebook support group.

What Are We Doing to Prevent This from Happening Again?

Obviously, we don't like this happening. In my (10+) years of working on web development systems, I believe I've only experienced one or twice this amount of downtime. Although there's very little we can do in terms of the actual downtime (we were unfortunate that our server was hit), we're looking to obviously mitigate the issue so it doesn't affect us to this extent again .

This is what we're doing:-

• A number of off site support channels are being set up – We're first off setting up a Twitter – it's available at @AuctionRequest, as it's probably the easiest thing we can do. Whilst we'd prefer not to be using this during normal operations for support (please, contact us if you need to do this), it'll help us get the message out when there's a service disruption.
• Decoupling of emails from the site – Obviously, having both emails and the website hosted in the same place is not great. We're looking into ways in which we can use third parties to host emails.
• Reviewing where our DNS is hosted – we're going to take a look at a few things, linked to the decoupling of the emails. One such thing is decoupling the DNS from our main host, with a service like Cloudflare. This will allow us to restore things a bit quicker if we have a similar event (I feel I should reiterate that although we suffered downtime, no data was lost, and we take daily backups).
• A comprehensive hosting review – Due to the original rush in getting the site live, we probably didn't spend as long as we would have liked in reviewing hosting options. Now that things are back to normal, we'll be spending some time reviewing our options moving forward.

Again, we're really sorry with what happened. I know how hard both me & Scott have been working on this project, and having this happen outside our control is frustrating. I hope that our level of support has helped shown support in what we're trying to do.  

We're happy to take questions over email, and we'll update this post as needed.

Take Care

Rhys Wynne

Today I've spent some time working on the site to introduce two new tools. These tools are designed to complement the link generator, making it easy for you, the user, to do simple things. This is based on feedback we have received.

The first tool is a eBay dynamic feed generator to Auction Request feeds converter. This exists because people were looking for a way to convert their old feeds to the new feeds as they had thousands of pages. I wasn't comfortable in writing an SQL script which could go wrong, so instead that is a one size fits all solution. It's not automated, but it should save some time.

The second additional tool is a free to premium URL converter. We've spotted that a number of people when upgrading start with free, test on a few URLs and then when they are happy with the free version upgrade to premium. This tool will hopefully make it a bit easier for users to change their links once they've upgraded to premium.

Also, we've created a blog! We've got a bunch of new exciting things to talk about so I felt it was a good way to share these announcements.