Show HN: A successful penny-auction bot | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A successful penny-auction bot

github.com

74 pointsqixxiq12 comments

If anyone has any questions I'll be happy to answer them.

Unfortunately working on my startup came first over challenging them legally -- since the value of the winnings was over $5000, I would have had to fly to their local court in order to proceed legally.

If placing a bet increases the time remaining, then how does "sniping" work and what advantage does your bot give you?

This is a good question. I've consulted for a penny auction site, and this set of scripts shouldn't be called "sniping" bots - the time restarts unless you're the last bidder, and you really can't tell if you're the last bidder.

They do make sense as "autobid" bots, but that's different - many sites actually let you autobid automatically, no bot needed.

Looking at the readme, it looks like his strategy is to anticipate the other bots and bid a few seconds before they try to snipe it.

  There are quite often a number of people waiting to snipe that bid after the
  time limit has exceeded. When this happens, even though my bot prevented the
  auction from ending, they land up with the timer counting down (and then I
  need to bid to prevent them from winning.) For this reason the bot has a
  percentage chance it will try 'kill', by bidding with 4-5s remaining, and
  hoping all the snipers miss.hoping all the snipers miss.

i wrote up some content and code (just a greasemonkey script) for doing this on swoopo last year - http://jcs.org/notaweblog/2009/03/06/trying_to_game_swoopo_c....

i assume the site you did this with doesn't have the same problem as swoopo did, where their automated server-side bidding mechanism was favored over manual bids?

do you have any figures on how long it took to win any particular auctions, how much money it cost, and how many auctions you lost?

The automated bidding was randomly in the last ten seconds (from a brief look at Swoopo its the same). That was quite easily beaten my a bot that could bid at the last second.

I put in equivalent of $3,000

Won: iPhone 4 32gb, $200 vouchers, Dell Streak, 64gb iPad, 640gb hdd, BlackBerry Torch, 2x GPS, Wii game, 32gb iPod, 100gm gold bar (and still had roughly $300 of bids left)

^ All in two weeks which raised a lot of red flags and then got my account suspended. It was a little greedy perhaps - but I figured they'd probably update their terms and conditions with text against bots at which point I would have stopped.

I wasn't aware that penny auctions are continuously winnable at all.

Now that there are bots, they really aren't.

See my answer above but bots really don't change anything about penny auctions. Most allow for placing multiple bids which effectively automates the auto-bids and does what bots would do but better.

Well, it's "better" in the sense that they may allow things that a bot couldn't realistically pull off, but it's not really better because everyone has access to the tool. The advantage of writing a bot is exploiting a loophole in the system that most people aren't aware of. If everyone has the same tools then it's a fools game through and through, at least for something as simple as penny auctions (Poker is another story obviously).

bots really don't change anything about penny auctions

Hm, surely they would put the naive users who don't have bots at a further disadvantage?

You'd have better luck using a strategy to win at blackjack. Or even just playing poker for money online. At least that could be, theoretically, fun even if you lose. :P

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