#18 Your web browser settings are blocking cookies

[pgarner]

I'm getting a lot of failed auctions lately, when esniper saves the error html page from eBay, the error I'm getting is:

"Your web browser settings are blocking cookies."

Are esniper devs aware of this issue?

I'm still winning some auctions, but there seems to be something wrong to be getting this error so often.

[Bodo]

Thank you for reporting this problem.

Please add the bug report message that esniper writes in this case. This message contains important information about the location inside esniper where the problem was found. Additionally the saved HTML page might contain some information. (depends on how eBay implemented the cookie check)
If you run esniper in the background you might not see esniper's error message. In this case try to reproduce the problem with stdout and stderr redirected to a file.

Handling of cookies was the reason to switch from hand-crafted HTTP parsing to using libcurl some years ago. CURL can only handle HTTP cookies. If eBay changed some pages to use JavaScript for setting cookies, it may get difficult.

Or you may have found a bug in esniper.

[pgarner]

Here's an example html page

I am running esniper in the background via this http://backsla.sh/sniper which apparently directs the stderr to log file. Unfortunately it has been overwriting the log each time the esniper process is restarted so I have lost logs from the time the cookie error happened.

I've changed this now and will look out for useful info in the logs

[Bodo]

Interesting. I didn't know this frontend.

Unfortunately the error page looks like a static page, it doesn't seem to contain any information about the expected cookie.

[pgarner]

I have had this error again and was able to capture the logging:

Automated esniper bug report.
esniper version 2.28.0
libcurl/7.19.7 OpenSSL/1.0.0 zlib/1.2.3 libidn/1.18 libssh2/1.4.2
Error encountered in function ebayLogin in auction.c line 440
auction = 190981529287, price = 3.39, remain = 0
latency = 0, result = -1, error = 19
buf = 0xda4730, size = 11918, read = 0xda4730
time = 1385565617, offset = 0
pagename = "Browser Problem", pageid = "(null)", srcid = "(null)"
specified options or config values:
  1 x username(u) = ***
  1 x password() = ***
  1 x seconds(s) = 9
  1 x quantity(q) = 100
  1 x (f) = "inma"
unknown pageinfo

It's not happening every time, it's intermittent.

Some regular web users also report having this problem but only in Firefox:
http://community.ebay.com/t5/Technical-Issues/Your-web-browser-settings-are-blocking-cookies-no-they-re-not/qaq-p/18083707

Seems like we should maybe just retry (if I followed the code right, this unhandled error page prevents login retries?)

[Bodo]

OK. We have at least a unique page title "Browser Problem" which can be used to identify this situation. (Better than many other unexpected pages.) And the code location (function ebayLogin in auction.c line 440) is also valuable information. If retrying will help we can implement this.