BidBlink

Cyber Monday is upon us! BidBlink has a number of special things happening today:

• You can still use promo code 'BLACKFRIDAY' to get 10% more bids on your next bid purchase.
• In addition, we've just added promo code 'CYBERMONDAY' to get 10% more bids on an additional bidpack purchase.
• We have our biggest auction we've done so far: a 42 inch LCD TV from Sharp.

Early this morning, BidBlink experienced an issue on auction number 709 (the $100 Amazon gift card). Basically, the auction ended, but 2 bids sneaked in after it ended. We have corrected the auction to reflect the proper winner, credited bids back to those affected, and have fixed the bug from ever happening again.

I've just spent the past several hours analyzing this with my team to determine exactly what happened and why. Basically, there existed a very rare race condition. It happens only when someone bids at the very last moment, right as the auction is closing, but only about 0.01% of the time. It is very rare. Unfortunately, it happened last night on a very contested auction.

Ryan and I have manually reconstructed every single action taken by users during this auction. The rightful winner is jstep4. The user jstep4 still had autobids loaded when the auction ended, and was the winner when the time ran out. Two invalid bids by users 'mrslobo' and 'rs90909' where accepted by the system when they should have been rejected (because the auction was rightfully over). There was no malicious activity by these users -- the error was because of our software. We have determined exactly which users were affected by this bug and corrected things accordingly by crediting bids as appropriate. I also want to note that we have determined that jstep4 won by careful analysis of our logs and records. jstep4 placed many bids, but that was not a factor in our analysis. All that matters is who placed the last bid.

The 30 Minute Buy Now window

When we designed our 30 minute Buy Now window, we didn't think auctions would last all night. Our intent was never that folks would have to stay awake all night in order to opt into this feature. We will be looking at this very closely soon and will likely make changes to make it so you don't have to sit by your computer all night. In the mean time, please email support if you have an expired buy now opportunity that resulted because of an extremely long auction, and we will extend it.

Again, I apologize for any confusion this auction has caused. We have fixed the bug and it shouldn't happen again.