Feedback

re: Bidding steps per auction: This is actually a pretty good idea, especially for sites where both cheap and expensive stuff will be auctioned. I'll keep it in mind.

re: Hidden minimum sell price: Yeah, the eBay terminology for this is "reserve price." You're not the first to request it, but personally I'm not a big fan of that feature. If you don't want to sell it for less than $X, start the bidding at $X! For that admittedly selfish reason, I'm not going to complicate the core codebase with that feature unless our client requests it. I wouldn't be upset about seeing a third-party module which adds this functionality, though, and would work with the developer of that if any reasonable changes need to be made to the core codebase for compatibility.

re: Unpublishing expired auctions - The problem with that is that winners would have to be able to see unpublished nodes in order to purchase the product they've won - and losers would have to be able to see unpublished nodes to see that they didn't win an auction, of outbid notification is disabled. And I think you have to have the "administer nodes" permission in order to do that - which is obviously too permissive for this case. But there is an easy way to make expired auctions less visible; create a View with a filter specifying that the auction's expiry date must be greater than the current time.

Unpublishing the product is not a good idea, like Garrett told.

- I'm planing to do it with workflow; set new products (on create) in a default state, like active-product
- when auction ends use the api to fire a workflow state update of the product to ended-product, or inactive-product

Your view or list, should only show the items that are on state: active-products, so the inactive once are not shonw anymore, but can be seen if you have the link to the product.

I think this is also possible with Buy It Now items, I don't know if when they are purchased the expiry is set to 0, but with state they can be hidden as well.

Another way can be: (but don't think I'm going to use it) to use the workflow like described above and activate also workflow access and give access to all the bidders on the product, so they can see the product in the list. If this works, you shouldn't use the workflow state in your view, just give access to people bidded on the product and if state is inactive restrict to all others.

HTH,
Fossie

I think this is also possible with Buy It Now items, I don't know if when they are purchased the expiry is set to 0, but with state they can be hidden as well.

When an item is purchased using Buy now, the expiry time is set to the moment the purchase is made (payment is received). Also, a new bid is placed in the bid table at the same time for the sell price of the product.

Maybe a suggestion about the bidding steps per auction:

for cheap and expensive products, you can also introduce a % of the price iso using a value.

For example give minimum bid = current bid + % of currrent bid (or % to the starting price), just a thought.

I need it also in some way and I think if you let the admin choose
a) a value (like $ 0.5)
b) a percentage ( 5% )

should do in most cases.

If you need to enter the intervals for each product you put on the site it's more work for the admin.

HTH,
Fossie

A percentage for the minimum bid? Interesting, but there will be problems dealing with how to keep the minimum bid value in synch with the bid increment value.

I've taken steps in the direction of having the limits in the configuration be "default" limits, and allowing each auctioned item to have its own limits which would override the default ones. I think that will work.

Ebay/Yahoo style variable bid increments may be better than a fixed bid increment:

http://pages.ebay.com/help/buy/bid-increments.html#what

This allows for the increment to change as the price increases, rather than having a fixed increment which may be too large or too small for the changing price of the item. Minimum bid value becomes the current bid value plus the corresponding bid increment.

Fixed and per-item bid increments are not going to work for my project, unfortunately. Would it be possible to expose this functionality so that different bid increment methods can be added by additional modules?

It looks like eBay is using the term "increments" to mean something differently than how UC Auction uses "increments." In UC Auction, any bid placed must have the increment value as a factor. So if the increment value is $0.25, a bid of $8.30 could not be placed because $8.30 cannot be cleanly divided by $0.25. eBay, on the other hand, seems to be using the term to mean something closer to what UC Auction calls its minimum bid increase value; so if an item's current high bid is $8.00 and the bid increase value (or increment value, in eBay terms) is $0.50, any bid lower than $8.50 will not be accepted.

So let's put the question this way: Is it possible for other modules to adjust the bid increment value of an auction? I'm going to give that a qualified yes, because the minimum bid that can be placed on an item is calculated when the item is loaded. In uc_auction.module's hook_nodeapi() when $op === 'load', lines 409-410-ish:

				$auc['min_bid'] = $auc['high_bid_amt'] + variable_get('uc_auction_min_increase', .5);
				$node->uc_auction = $auc;

So: Implement your own module with its own hook_nodeapi() which simply changes the value of $node->uc_auction['min_bid'] to whatever you want it to be. I'm 80% certain that's all you have to do. If not, let me know.

The new dev version I just committed adds optional fields to each auctioned product to override the increment, minimum bid increase, maximum bid increase, and maximum bid increase percentages on a per-auction level. Please test if you can.

I made some database changes, but this is also the first release which should allow you to make the necessary updates to the database as you would normally, by running update.php; reinstalling the Ubercart Auction module shouldn't be necessary.

Hmm… No, it should have been packaged on the 16th. The commit succeeded, so I'm not sure why the system hasn't made a new package. I'll look into it, but I'm not sure if there's anything I can do.

Well, I'm not sure why there's still no new package - maybe it has something to do with the downtime for the D6 conversion. Here's an archive.