Thanks to all the users who have flagged up problems with WordBay (and other eBay RSS-based software) caused by changes to the eBay RSS feed. I am sorry I did not get to grips with this sooner - it seemed to me initially that the problems were not affecting WordBay, but on further investigation there are some strange behaviours. Most notably, links to eBay items do not take you to the item itself but to an eBay login screen, which obviously significantly reduces the chances of sales (though strangely, my sales don’t seem affected that much). This appears to be due to some kind of change in the structure of the so-called “rover” links produced by the RSS feed, in turn maybe caused by a change to the RSS call itself.
I need to look into this ASAP and get it fixed - I hope it is not a complicated issue that would mean major changes, and that it will be a matter of a day or two. So please hold tight and sorry once again that this was not fixed sooner.
Problem with countries.txt file?
One user has also complained of a problem with WordBay not finding the countries.txt file (giving a 403 error) and preventing the countries being displayed in the drop-down lists in the admin panel (the countries.txt file simply contains a delimited list of all the country names). This is an issue entirely unrelated to that of the RSS feed, I am pretty sure of that, but if anyone else has had this problem please let me know. It sounds to me like the file might either be missing or have the wrong file permissions (no read permissions), but it could be some other issue relating to server configuration which I cannot really fix on an individual basis. This might only relate to v1.16 which I put out a few days ago specifically to deal with how WordBay figures out the path to the countries.txt file. The plugin now gets the path “properly”, i.e. the valid Wordpress way, so there should not be a problem as Wordpress uses these same functions internally too.As a “first resort” please do check that the countries.txt is actually present in your wp-content/plugins/wordbay directory. And make sure the plugin is installed to that directory too!
Back with a new version very soon I hope!
Posted on February 18th, 2010 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized
(naturally please correct me if I am wrong)
If your code is just base64_encoding & decoding the RSS’s buy link (with just a little obstification of two words) I can’t see how **any** changes to the RSS’s buy link’s formatting will cause any problems.
I know that BANS and McJiffy sites have hit problems, but their code actually *manipulates* the RSS buy link. (I recoded my McJiffy sites to just use the encoding method to mask the links and errors&revenue have continued as normal).
Mark, double check the code that creates the “Click for Details” button link.
Just did some testing and in the case of the folks who are reporting the ‘link goes to login page’ problem, if you click on the item name or ‘buy now’ link it takes you to the correct place. but if you click on the “Click for Details” button that link takes you to the eBay log in page. (I don’t use the “Click for Details” button on any of my sites that could be why I’ve never noticed any errors).
Seems that link 293 is the offending one, that link uses $newurl while the rest of the code seems to use $href.
Chuck, I am going to have to make you an honorary member of the WordBay development team
(currently numbering one!) That’s awesome detective work!! Now wonder the problem was “intermittent” - it depended on which link I was clicking on at the time! But that problem must have been present before this RSS feed change - as you say, my code does not actually change the structure of the links, merely base64-encodes them. Pretty cheesy, but best I could manage at the time.
Well, as you pointed out, my error was to supply the “Bid/Watch” link ($newurl) to the Click for Details icon, which obviously WOULD log you into your eBay account in order for you to bid or watch, and not to the details page, which is the page pointed to by $href. So in short, I now have a working version, which I will hold off on releasing until tomorrow because I have spotted some use of legacy WP functions which might get deprecated soon and I want to upgrade them (programmer speak for “I want to tinker with a few other things”). Anyone who knows what they are doing can safely substitute $newurl with $href in line 293, but if not it’s probably best to hold on till I release a new version tomorrow hopefully.
Once again thanks Chuck - amazing no-one spotted that before (including me) - wonder if it had much of an impact on people’s sales. Can’t have had a positive effect in any case…
Yup, that ‘undocumented feature’ has been in place since at least v0.9
and no site admins have noticed it when testing their site, strange. Ahh well, at least it’s sorted now.
Sigh, the joys of programming… Now just to establish what is going on with the RSS feed and whether we are being robbed of sales….