eBay sellers are manipulating ABrowser to gain visibility

3 risposte [Ultimo contenuto]
amenex
Offline
Iscritto: 01/04/2015

In the past few days, my eBay search strings have been returning two orders of magnitude more hits than previously.

I got around that problem by copying & pasting the saved URL's of the searches from my ABrowser bookmarks into IceCat and then allowing javascript in the ensuing popups. The result is that the returned hits cover eBay titles only, wheras the ABrowser hits had surreptitiously been changed to "title and description." The same happens with IceCat, except that when I "allow" javascript, then the "search title and description" box reappears on the IceCat page, suitably checked/unchecked as per my original intent.

What appears to be happening is that the eBay sellers have figured out how to turn off the "search title & description" box in ABrowser, which prevents me from unclicking that box.

Switching to IceCat isn't a permanent solution, because the other scripts that are in the IceCat search results are severely limited. For example, I can't change the way the hits are sorted, and the script for viewing the several images in a selected eBay ad doesn't work.

How can I find out who among the eBay sellers is including the script that commandeers my ABrowser settings ? It appears only to take one ... as this inflation in the number of search hits happened suddenly, from one day to the next.

amenex
Offline
Iscritto: 01/04/2015

Previously, I wrote:
> What appears to be happening is that the eBay sellers have figured out how to turn
> off the "search title & description" box in ABrowser, which prevents me from unclicking that box.

Today that box has mysteriously reappeared, and the junk hits are absent.
Nothing has changed at my end ...

onpon4
Offline
Iscritto: 05/30/2012

Abrowser is not very popular, so to assume that it is being targeted by anyone is a bit extraordinary. Also, eBay sellers can't change eBay's layout.

If I had to guess, it would be that you had JavaScript disabled. I don't know, though.

mozzwald
Offline
Iscritto: 08/30/2016

I experienced the same problem using Firefox and it appears to be an issue with ebay according to this blog post: http://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2016/8/1472387297.html

I cleared cookies yesterday and the problem went away for me.