Online Auctions

[chezhump]

Does anyone have any recommendations of a site/program that allows an online auction draft?

We have some travel issues that will keep a couple of owners from being there live. The speakerphone thing is a non-starter, we've done it before and it was too dificult keeping the person on the line apprised of what was going on.

[hqforums]

www.fantasyauctioneer.com is a new service that is supposed to offer this. Baseball HQ will be participating in an experts league they are hosting this year, and that will be our first opportunity to evaluate it. So until then, we rally can't vouch for how good they are.

RON@HQ

[chezhump]

Thanks Ron

[NICK@HQ]

Looks nice, but it's the usual brain-dead IE-only, please pretend we all live in a Microsoft world type of web site that doesn't belong on the Web. Grrrr.

Yeah, I know, I'm being inflammatory, but frankly it's reached the point where I think you have to be nuts to use Windows on the Web. Use Linux or Mac, and save Windows for non-Net activities like gaming. Give it 5 or 10 years, and enough people will become horrified by Longhorn's "features" and license terms, or will actually read the WMV license terms they blithely clicked OK to, or will get one piece of spyware or another virus too many that Website designers will finally realize that a sizable chunk of the online world refuses to use Microsoft products and never will. So catering to a Windows-only crowd is bad business, and completely against the spirit of what the Web was supposed to be. Bah!

End of rant. This anti-Microsoft screed was brought to you by the letter M. We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread, and I sincerely hope you enjoy www.fantasyauctioneer.com for your auction needs. Just because I hate their designers with a passion doesn't mean their site won't work just dandy for you.

[Tom_T]

Nick, I was able to run it using Firefox instead of IE. And since it's written in Java, I'd guess that it would (or could) also work under a non-Windows platform.

I do use Firefox almost all of the time, by the way. It's still Windows, granted, but it's not IE, so that's a start.

[NICK@HQ]

Thanks, Tom, for a kind response to my screed. Unfortanately, when I say it's Windows-only, I mean it:

"If you are on a non-Windows platform, unfortunately, the Java Runtime Environment our software uses is only supported by Windows."

Even though I have the correct Java version, and even though I tried it in Camino, Safari, Firefox, and even IE, it's no go for me. They are running on the WWW, but for some reason they decided to make the brain-dead decision to use Windows-only functionality, thereby making a mockery of their presence on the Web. Web sites are not supposed to know or care how you are accessing their sites.

That's OK, I've never had a problem doing group IM chats for our live auctions. Using software that works for any machine...

[Tom_T]

I feel your pain. I did notice that it took a very long time for the applet to load under Firefox. I haven't tried it under IE.

Java applications that only run under Windows defeat the whole purpose of Java.

[chezhump]

Looks promising

I took the demo for a test drive and it looks like this might nail exactly what I'm looking for. Version 2 may offer just about everything we need.