
Show HN: A successful penny-auction bot - qixxiq
https://github.com/qix/penny-bot
======
qixxiq
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.

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

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seancron
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.

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there
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...](http://jcs.org/notaweblog/2009/03/06/trying_to_game_swoopo_com/).

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?

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qixxiq
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.

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

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

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rubyrescue
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.

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dasil003
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).

