RSS feed support gone for good? | Hacker News Reader

RSS feed support gone for good?

community.ebay.com

5 pointsmarojejian4 comments

I'm so sad to see this feature go - I used it every day, and bought most of my eBay items via it.

If anyone feels the same, I encourage you to leave a comment on the ebay forum post.

In all the talk about RSS being dead/back on HN, it's the loss of features like this that matter to me.

For those that don't know, this feature was on life support for years. you had to learn to add the parameter "_rss=1" to make a feed. and then they'd break periodically. But even given all that it was great: you could make a feed from any search.

This will effectively remove all my "browsing" in eBay, I'll only go there when I want to find a lower price on a specific thing to buy.

P.S. a comment this reddit thread seems to confirm that this was a deliberate retirement. https://www.reddit.com/r/Flipping/comments/ty009f/ebay_rss_f...

At first I thought it might have been a bug, but now that I tested other parameters I see that "_rss=1" isn't just ignored but rather the http response is a redirect to an rss-less path. This doesn't occur with other arbitrary query strings.

This has been the primary way I made my shopping on ebay for over 10 years. None of the existing tools ebay offers compare to a local Newsboat client that alerts you when:

1. A rare item you've been looking for has been listed.

2. A Buy-It-Now price thershold has been met.

3. An auction is ending in say 6 hours and its price is in the accepted range.

I can think of no convincing reasons why ebay might want to kill this feature intentionally: Rate limiting has already been in place in case that's what bothered them. In fact, the search rss rate limiting was less restrictive than their official (more advance) find-API. Is this an attempt to get rid of users who should have used the find-API? Maybe, probably not though.

If there isn't already an open source translation service that takes an ebay search URL as its input and returns an RSS feed as its result, I will try to write one.

Not completely...yet.

https://www.ebay.com/dsc/i.html?_nkw=walkman&_rss=1

That comment is like sweet music from a distant room, thank you for that!

I just migrated my Newsboat's urls file and all seem to work, for now.

Seems like in the past I used the https://www.ebay.com/dsc/i.html search API for some URLs but ended up migrating everything to https://www.ebay.com/dsc/i.html due to some problem that I cannot quite remember, but that was ages ago.

I think that regardless, I might try to write a lightweight wrapper around their search API just because sometimes, randomly it seems, either ebay ignores my search filters and returns many unrelated results, or perhaps it's a client error (never got to research the logs when that happened). I was planning to part the filtering part as a Newsboat filter, but it might just be easier to implement it elsewhere.

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