Midwest Amphicar
Worlds Largest Amphicar Destination
We need to complain to Ebay about Wholesale car parts. These a holes are every where with crap that does not belong to any make or model. 
Later Dave the Wave
Later Dave the Wave
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Complain to Ebay
- Thread starter Midwest Amphicar
- Start date
I just filed my complaint.
Brian Crombie
Member
Dave & Mike,
It can't hurt to send an e-mail to the seller also. I just did. Although these folks have over half a million transactions, I suspect my request may fall on deaf ears. I WISH my Amphicar required a high performance, readily available air filter and grab bars!
Brian Crombie
To: bad.dogg@hotmail.com
Subject: RE: [General Amphicar Discussion-t-20587] Complain to Ebay
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:50:51 -0400
From:
I just filed my complaint.
_________________________________________________________________
Your E-mail and More On-the-Go. Get Windows Live Hotmail Free.
http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/171222985/direct/01/
It can't hurt to send an e-mail to the seller also. I just did. Although these folks have over half a million transactions, I suspect my request may fall on deaf ears. I WISH my Amphicar required a high performance, readily available air filter and grab bars!
Brian Crombie
To: bad.dogg@hotmail.com
Subject: RE: [General Amphicar Discussion-t-20587] Complain to Ebay
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:50:51 -0400
From:
I just filed my complaint.
_________________________________________________________________
Your E-mail and More On-the-Go. Get Windows Live Hotmail Free.
http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/171222985/direct/01/
Ed Price
Member
_____
From: Brian Crombie [mailto:]
Sent: Wednesday, October 14, 2009 4:48 PM
To: edprice@cox.net
Subject: RE: [General Amphicar Discussion-t-20587] Complain to Ebay
Dave & Mike,
It can't hurt to send an e-mail to the seller also. I just did. Although
these folks have over half a million transactions, I suspect my request may
fall on deaf ears. I WISH my Amphicar required a high performance, readily
available air filter and grab bars!
Brian Crombie
My favorite was their 31" long tubular muffler, with 5" diameter inlet &
outlet pipes, that fits a 60-67 Amphicar.
I have griped to them long ago, and they blame it on the eBay search engine
(that finds several hidden references to Amphicar in the source code), so
they won't do anything.
I suppose that eBay doesn't care, since these guys flow lots of commissions
(notice their 1/2 million rating?) into eBay. Complaining to eBay is like
taking a Turing test and failing it.
In earlier discussions here, the only viable thing to do is search only on
auction Titles, and not all of the body text too. (I have tried using a
Boolean "-Wholesale", but eBay's engine doesn't seem to understand the
concept of exclusion of terms from a search.)
Now, this idiot vendor is beginning to use the word AMPHICAR in the auction
title, so I don't see a way to avoid the junk ads. Perhaps the ad writing
droid will eventually tire of typing AMPHICAR over and over again. OTOH,
heaven help us if it's an automaton; who knows how many Wholesale auctions
will get labeled for us?
Perhaps if enough of us made it a special hobby to call 1-866-828-4322 every
so often, they might get tired of wasting time and change their ways. Just
maybe.
Ed Price
El Cajon, CA USA
WB6WSN
1961 Amphicar
1987 MB 420SEL
From: Brian Crombie [mailto:]
Sent: Wednesday, October 14, 2009 4:48 PM
To: edprice@cox.net
Subject: RE: [General Amphicar Discussion-t-20587] Complain to Ebay
Dave & Mike,
It can't hurt to send an e-mail to the seller also. I just did. Although
these folks have over half a million transactions, I suspect my request may
fall on deaf ears. I WISH my Amphicar required a high performance, readily
available air filter and grab bars!
Brian Crombie
My favorite was their 31" long tubular muffler, with 5" diameter inlet &
outlet pipes, that fits a 60-67 Amphicar.
I have griped to them long ago, and they blame it on the eBay search engine
(that finds several hidden references to Amphicar in the source code), so
they won't do anything.
I suppose that eBay doesn't care, since these guys flow lots of commissions
(notice their 1/2 million rating?) into eBay. Complaining to eBay is like
taking a Turing test and failing it.
In earlier discussions here, the only viable thing to do is search only on
auction Titles, and not all of the body text too. (I have tried using a
Boolean "-Wholesale", but eBay's engine doesn't seem to understand the
concept of exclusion of terms from a search.)
Now, this idiot vendor is beginning to use the word AMPHICAR in the auction
title, so I don't see a way to avoid the junk ads. Perhaps the ad writing
droid will eventually tire of typing AMPHICAR over and over again. OTOH,
heaven help us if it's an automaton; who knows how many Wholesale auctions
will get labeled for us?
Perhaps if enough of us made it a special hobby to call 1-866-828-4322 every
so often, they might get tired of wasting time and change their ways. Just
maybe.
Ed Price
El Cajon, CA USA
WB6WSN
1961 Amphicar
1987 MB 420SEL
canitfloat
Member
Has anyone ever bought an INJEN air filter or heat shield for it for their Amphicar??? There has to be a way to get rid of these auctions...
CapnJohn
Amphi Guru & Former IAOC President
I've filed many complaints with eBay over this for 8 or 9 years and several with the top 3 sellers who add irrevelant keywords. I have gotten at least 4 others over the years to kindly remove inappropriate Amphicar references when I was president which leaves the 2 who could care less that we see now.
It is not a new problem at all and the search that excludes those spammers is about as easy as it gets. It's a very simple boolean search that took me only a few seconds to create. I don't see that crap any more. My last search for Amphicar stuff gave me 89 amphicar related results that will not change if the seller change the auctions. It will not filter out relevant listings like the example below clearly does. The example below will exclude about 28 Amphicar related auctions.
So to my friends here that want to know how I do it correctly using 3 words, send me a private email and I'll gladly show you how easy it is. I will not post it here!
It is not a new problem at all and the search that excludes those spammers is about as easy as it gets. It's a very simple boolean search that took me only a few seconds to create. I don't see that crap any more. My last search for Amphicar stuff gave me 89 amphicar related results that will not change if the seller change the auctions. It will not filter out relevant listings like the example below clearly does. The example below will exclude about 28 Amphicar related auctions.
So to my friends here that want to know how I do it correctly using 3 words, send me a private email and I'll gladly show you how easy it is. I will not post it here!
Ed Price
Member
I don't know why Mr. Bevins considers the details of implementing a Boolean
search to be knowledge that should be restricted only to his friends, and
not posted for all on this list. So, in the interests of fairness and the
unrestricted flow of information, I'll fill in the details.
First, don't complain, because nobody listens. Not eBay, because the big
spammers generate good commission flow into eBay. Not the keyword spammers,
because they believe that every search on eBay should drag people into their
site. You have to deal with this problem yourself.
I won't try to get into a discussion of symbolic math; just remember that
when you search for something, you can also tell the search engine to ignore
something too. For instance, I just clicked the TITLES & DESCRIPTION box,
then did a search on all of eBay for AMPHICAR. I received 1,904 hits,
including many with obviously non-Amphi related content. The spammers, such
as Autopartshaus, simply drop in the word AMPHICAR into either their title
or the body of their text (sometimes hidden in the source code, where you
don't see it in the ad), and the search engine finds it, and puts it into
your search results list.
Now, let's do some Boolean magic. Do another search, but this time, let's
search for AMPHICAR, type in a space, and then type in -POLICIES. (Yes, that
is a minus sign immediately preceding the letters.) This search returned
only 374 hits! Why? Because the search was first for all listings with
AMPHICAR, but then excluded (subtracted) any of those with POLICIES. And the
reason that POLICIES works to filter out Autopartshaus listings is that
those guys put a lot of text in their ads, and one of their phrases is
RETURN POLICIES.
Just by adding -POLICIES, you can filter out almost all those Autopartshaus
ads. I also tried doing a search for AMPHICAR -NSU (NSU is a name of another
obscure vehicle), and now I got only 102 hits. Doing a search for AMPHICAR
-POLICIES -NSU results in only 61 listings, all hard-core Amphi listings.
So, type in your search terms and save that search. Whenever you go back to
MY EBAY and view the SAVED SEARCHES, you just click on your AMPHICAR search,
and it will refresh, using whatever special terms you had entered. This will
work until jerks like Autopartshaus remove the keywords like NSU and SERVICE
POLICIES from their ads. Fortunately, those ads are not hand-created, some
sad clerk just types in over a template. Thus, until somebody changes the
template, they will provide their own way to ignore them. And then we just
look for some new keywords, and begin ignoring them all over again.
The only bad feature of filtering by keywords is that somebody with a valid
Amphicar ad will get ignored because they accidently included NSU or
POLICIES in their text. That seems like an acceptably low probability to me.
You can also do your search only in the TITLES area of the listings. I just
searched the TITLES ONLY (because I did not click the little box that would
have searched TITLES & DESCRIPTION), and received 97 hits. True, some of
these include Autopartshaus ads for antennas and wheel covers, but 97 hits
is not too bad when you think of the 1,807 ads that did get filtered.
Search by TITLES ONLY, and get 97 returns.
Search with strong Boolean filtering, and get 61 returns.
Either way, much better than 1,904 returns.
Ed Price
El Cajon, CA USA
WB6WSN
1961 Amphicar
1987 MB 420SEL
_____
From: CapnJohn [mailto:]
Sent: Monday, November 23, 2009 7:58 AM
To: edprice@cox.net
Subject: RE: [General Amphicar Discussion-t-20587] Re: Complain to Ebay
I've filed many complaints with eBay over this for 8 or 9 years and several
with the top 3 sellers who add irrevelant keywords. I have gotten at least 4
others over the years to kindly remove inappropriate Amphicar references
when I was president which leaves the 2 who could care less that we see now.
It is not a new problem at all and the search that excludes those spammers
is about as easy as it gets. It's a very simple boolean search that took me
only a few seconds to create. I don't see that crap any more. My last search
for Amphicar stuff gave me 89 amphicar related results.
So to my friends here that want to know how I do it, send me a private email
and I'll gladly show you how easy it is. I will not post it here!
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
John Bevins
Former IAOC President/Webmaster
search to be knowledge that should be restricted only to his friends, and
not posted for all on this list. So, in the interests of fairness and the
unrestricted flow of information, I'll fill in the details.
First, don't complain, because nobody listens. Not eBay, because the big
spammers generate good commission flow into eBay. Not the keyword spammers,
because they believe that every search on eBay should drag people into their
site. You have to deal with this problem yourself.
I won't try to get into a discussion of symbolic math; just remember that
when you search for something, you can also tell the search engine to ignore
something too. For instance, I just clicked the TITLES & DESCRIPTION box,
then did a search on all of eBay for AMPHICAR. I received 1,904 hits,
including many with obviously non-Amphi related content. The spammers, such
as Autopartshaus, simply drop in the word AMPHICAR into either their title
or the body of their text (sometimes hidden in the source code, where you
don't see it in the ad), and the search engine finds it, and puts it into
your search results list.
Now, let's do some Boolean magic. Do another search, but this time, let's
search for AMPHICAR, type in a space, and then type in -POLICIES. (Yes, that
is a minus sign immediately preceding the letters.) This search returned
only 374 hits! Why? Because the search was first for all listings with
AMPHICAR, but then excluded (subtracted) any of those with POLICIES. And the
reason that POLICIES works to filter out Autopartshaus listings is that
those guys put a lot of text in their ads, and one of their phrases is
RETURN POLICIES.
Just by adding -POLICIES, you can filter out almost all those Autopartshaus
ads. I also tried doing a search for AMPHICAR -NSU (NSU is a name of another
obscure vehicle), and now I got only 102 hits. Doing a search for AMPHICAR
-POLICIES -NSU results in only 61 listings, all hard-core Amphi listings.
So, type in your search terms and save that search. Whenever you go back to
MY EBAY and view the SAVED SEARCHES, you just click on your AMPHICAR search,
and it will refresh, using whatever special terms you had entered. This will
work until jerks like Autopartshaus remove the keywords like NSU and SERVICE
POLICIES from their ads. Fortunately, those ads are not hand-created, some
sad clerk just types in over a template. Thus, until somebody changes the
template, they will provide their own way to ignore them. And then we just
look for some new keywords, and begin ignoring them all over again.
The only bad feature of filtering by keywords is that somebody with a valid
Amphicar ad will get ignored because they accidently included NSU or
POLICIES in their text. That seems like an acceptably low probability to me.
You can also do your search only in the TITLES area of the listings. I just
searched the TITLES ONLY (because I did not click the little box that would
have searched TITLES & DESCRIPTION), and received 97 hits. True, some of
these include Autopartshaus ads for antennas and wheel covers, but 97 hits
is not too bad when you think of the 1,807 ads that did get filtered.
Search by TITLES ONLY, and get 97 returns.
Search with strong Boolean filtering, and get 61 returns.
Either way, much better than 1,904 returns.
Ed Price
El Cajon, CA USA
WB6WSN
1961 Amphicar
1987 MB 420SEL
_____
From: CapnJohn [mailto:]
Sent: Monday, November 23, 2009 7:58 AM
To: edprice@cox.net
Subject: RE: [General Amphicar Discussion-t-20587] Re: Complain to Ebay
I've filed many complaints with eBay over this for 8 or 9 years and several
with the top 3 sellers who add irrevelant keywords. I have gotten at least 4
others over the years to kindly remove inappropriate Amphicar references
when I was president which leaves the 2 who could care less that we see now.
It is not a new problem at all and the search that excludes those spammers
is about as easy as it gets. It's a very simple boolean search that took me
only a few seconds to create. I don't see that crap any more. My last search
for Amphicar stuff gave me 89 amphicar related results.
So to my friends here that want to know how I do it, send me a private email
and I'll gladly show you how easy it is. I will not post it here!
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
John Bevins
Former IAOC President/Webmaster
