What is the EBay RSS section?

[Art]

This section of the forum is made available via a feature recently introduced in the VBulletin software which allows seemless integration of RSS feeds into the forum message areas. More simply put, it is content produced and distributed by a host website that is placed onto another website. The EBay RSS feed works the same as the "advanced search" on EBay.com. That is, criteria is input and the results are displayed here.

I've experimented with the search terms and found what I think will give us a good result. I'm still experimenting with the features of the RSS feed program, so please be patient.

Regarding the feeds, remember, these are EBay auctions. You can look at them, you can participate in them, but the transactions that occur are between YOU and the SELLER. If you have an issue with something you purchased via EBay, use EBay to resolve your dispute. This message area is not meant to be for seller bashing or anything like that. So, do your due diligence and ask questions before parting with your money. YOU AND YOU ALONE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT YOU BUY AND SELL.

Art

[ade stevenson]

Hi Art, I am not sure if you are looking for feedback on this new feature or not? But if you don't mind, here are my thoughts.

I am not keen on it for several reasons. (It is being tried on another forum of which I am a member too.) I like to click on the forum when I sign on for "new today" posts. Now you get a sea of posts which are just ebay links.

Are we allowed to discuss e bay items featured?

I am sure it will alert members to items which they might not have found; this might be a twin edged sword if another forum member was bidding on it

Cheers, Ade.

[Art]

You won't receive new posts from the RSS feed section when you click on new posts. I specifically edited the code to prevent it and from receiving new posts made in the serial numbers database. Please report if you are still seeing posts from either of these sections.

You can talk about the items all you want.

[ade stevenson]

Hi Art, thanks for the reply.

I feel much better about it now.

Cheers, Ade.

[EricFG]

Couple o' questions:

First off, can anyone explain, slowly and plainly for those who are only marginally intelligent, what "RSS" or a "RSS feed" is? I just can't quite put my thumb on it yet.

Are the particular items from eBay randomly selected by the VB software? Or, if I or someone else has an E-auction can we get ours placed here?

And if those answers are "yes" and "no" why are we advertising for complete strangers?

I hasten to add I'm not condemning anything that goes on here, I'm just curious. Mostly because for such a long time we were not allowed to link to the E-channel and now the E-channel's here, live and in person.

BTW, there's lotsa good Soviet stuff on eBay.co.uk and eBay.de as well.

[Art]

RSS is simply a way of syndicating content. For example, site A has a message forum and would like to offer an RSS feed (RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication) for other websites to include on their own website. The RSS feed is a summary of content, it could be headlines from a newspaper, messages on a forum, or in this case auction listings from EBay. If the link to the wikipedia information is a little cryptic, try this.

What is the criteria used in selecting the auctions that are displayed here? Without getting to much into how the EBay advanced search tool works, the results here are based on the following search string "soviet (medal,pin,order,badge)". Searching in titles only. This means, I'm searching EBay for any items with the words "soviet" and "medal" or "soviet" and "pin" or "soviet" and "order" or "soviet" and "badge". There are countless different search strings I could use, but I felt that the majority of the items we'd be interested in would have these words in the title.

If you'd like to place your item in this section, feel free. I think it would be best to post it with the other auctions in the feed section because I am still figuring out a way to have these delete after a certain time. No one wants to see it after the auction ends. This brings us to why this site is advertising for complete strangers, because they are paying the same as google adsense, although in a different way. So, they are in effect proxy advertising for EBay.

I'll see how this works for EBay US. If this generates enough interest I'll look into adding other feeds, perhaps warsaw pact feeds that continually search EBay for items like "Yugoslavia" and "badge", "Czechoslovakia" and "medal", "Bulgaria" and "order", etc.