FaunaAuction.com??

Thanks Ken.

Maybe I could change the look and feel of that auction board enough so that it wouldn't ruffle any feathers. It doesn't look like I am going to be able to easily do what I want, though. I've been talking with the developer, and his opinion that charging for bidders to register is the kiss of death for an auction board, so he has never implemented it. And it would not be easy to do so.

So apparently the only way to do this will be to charge the $1 per auction fee, but registration for both bidders and sellers will have to be free of charge. This certainly takes a lot of control out of my hands over this.

So will it be worth taking a stab at it even without this registration fee? There will be feedback points, of course, so I could simply implement a three strike rule to ban anyone whom winds up being a problem. Will this be good enough?

I've contacted Danni Wilson, whom is an excellent Perl programmer (which the auction software is written in) and perhaps he will be able to help me make some mods. But he is kind of busy now, and it may take a while for him to break loose.

So do you all want to take a stab at a plain vanilla auction board to see how it flies? I'm willing to lay out the money and set it up if the interest is there.

Thanks.

Ya know even if you don't charge a registration fee or membership fee you could still require credit card info to register. That would make it harder to have multiple identities which someone voiced concern about. What I mean is that if you get banned it would stop you from registering with another identity. With the same credit card anyway. Then you could also charge listing fees directly to the card given during registration. Not having to bill ppl and collect money would be 1 less hassle. Just some thoughts. -Chris

Hmm, but accepting credit card info would require being linked through a SSL certificate to encrypt that information. I would not recommend anyone sending cc info in the clear without having it encrypted, so I certainly could not make it a requirement of registration.

Danni seems to think he may be able to tie the registration to the auction with the database here, so registration could be done from this site. But I don't know how long it would take him to find the time to look into it. At least it is a possibility sometime down the road.

I suppose as long as I keep on top of deadbeat bidders and problem sellers, and be rather ruthless about it, then it should keep things in line in the meantime.

How do you plan to collect fees though? I think it's become a point and click world and you're gonna need a secure site. I for 1 know that I'm actually willing to pay a little more for something if I can buy it online and pay online. It's just so easy that way. That's of course just my opinion. -Chris

I don't know the answer to that yet. I believe there will be a direct tie in with PayPal. I may also be able to redirect registrations to my own SSL certificate. I can share my SSL cert with all of the domains on my server. Danni Wilson showed me how to do this little trick.

Yes, I am fully aware of the attraction of "click the button" selling.

I got an email from the developer of the software I am looking at concerning controlling abuse:

Another feature we have is in the config.pl you can setup how many postive feedbacks the users has to have before they can bid on unlimited auction items, if under this them they are limited on auction items they have current open running bids on at a time this you also setup in the config.pl file. Example: the max auction items they can bid on at a time is set at 3 and the postive feedbacks needed for unlimmited is set to 10 then if the users has less than 10 postive feedbacks they can only bid on the max of 3 diferent running auction items at a time. you can set this to what ever.

Might be somewhat useful to do damage control from new registrations with mischief on their minds. Also, I believe the sellers can ban users from bidding on their auctions as well.

I guess like anything else, nothing is perfect. I may have to run with it, "as is", and then hope it can be massaged into something better. Either that, or maybe something better will come along in the meantime.

That sounds like a great idea. Limiting bids allowed based on feedback. Another question I have is based on what I think is a problem in ebay. I absolutely hate being outbid in the last seconds with no time to bid again. What I thought would be a good idea is if there is a bid, let's say in the last minute, then the auction would run an additional 5 min or whatever to allow ppl to bid again. True auction style as opposed to "sniper" style. Any thoughts on that? -Chris

I have seen that on one of the gun auctions I frequent, and as a bidder, I hate it. Takes some of the fun out of it for me. Now I don't like the sniping programs that do that automatically, but I always did like sitting there in front of the screen, waiting to launch my bid and hoping there weren't a dozen other people doing the same thing. Of course, as a seller, I would probably like the auction to be extended as long as necessary to get every possible bid in.

But it depends on if this is implemented in the software or not, and right now, I don't know. I rather doubt it, though. Maybe in one of the $3,000+ packages it may be.

I always thought that auctions should be fun. So if I can, I'm going to try like heck to keep anything I set up along those lines as something that will be fun to do.

I stopped going to Ebay because it wasn't fun any longer.

Well, I bought an auction package last night and it is installed on my server. I don't have any public links to it yet, since I am still fiddling with it. But as soon as it is ready, I'll just link it up so going to FaunaAuction.com will automatically crank it up for you.

It actually seems rather easy to modify. I just spent a couple of hours on the formatting a little bit and made the color scheme pretty much match this site. Now I have to delete the stuff that came on the auction and put in my own categories and subcategories. Then do some testing.

There are a lot more bells and whistles than I thought in there. This might actually be fun! I may even use it myself. Of course, I'm going to be pretty much useless trying to help anyone with any problems, since I'm a newbie with that software too.

But some things I want to disable right off the bat. The system can allow a seller to attach music files, which would probably drive people batty. There are also a bunch of "attention getter" icons that are tacky as all getout. I haven't figured out how to disable them quite yet, but I think I have set it up so that nearly everyone will be REAL reluctant to use them. You'll see what I mean....

Gosh! I think this might be ready to go even by this weekend! I think this software has been around long enough that nearly all of the bugs should have been ironed out of it. So I'm not going to beat myself to death too much testing it out. But bear in mind that there may be some aesthetic changes early on as I try to fine tune the look and feel of it all.

One negative thing I did notice is that the auction board software is NOT based on a MySQL database like I had thought it would be. So directly interfacing it with the user file on this site will probably not really be feasible at all. Darn.....

I'm about ready to put the categories and subcategories into the auction board. Looks like there are only two levels available to work with so I am thinking of doing the structure listed below:

• Reptiles & Amphibians
• Snakes
• Lizards
• Turtles & Tortoises
• Amphibians
• Crocodilians
• Feed, Caging, Supplies & Services
• All other herp related material

• Insects & Arachnids
• Insects & Arachnids
• Products & Services

• Birds
• Birds
• Products & Services

• Mammals
• Mammals
• Products & Services

• Fish & Aquatics
• Fish & Aquatics
• Products & Services

• Miscellaneous
• Miscellaneous Animal Goods
• Miscellaneous Non-Animal Items

Any comments or suggestions?

WebSlave,

Congratulations! I will be using this FaunaAuction.com as soon as this year's babies are born. Good luck!

Regards.