Clock Change Bug Again - Auction Durations + 1 hour | Technical Issues

wellingnorth · 2025-10-20T09:03:03.807000Z

Morning @kat@ebay as the clocks are going back on Sunday I came back here to revisit our previous discussion about the bug with the duration of auctions that run across the clock change, unfortunately it has been archived. I’m not sure whether you are able to access it internally so you can see the previous history of the issue and your conversations with tech, but this was the active link:https://community.ebay.co.uk/t5/Technical-Issues/Clock-change-bug-Duration-7d-1-hour/ Anyway, to summarize the whole issue again, the ebay policy is that auctions always run for solid blocks of 24 hours, so if you start an auction at 7pm and the auction finishes after the clocks go back it will end at 6pm or vice versa if the clocks go forwardhttps://www.ebay.co.uk/help/selling/listings/creating-managing-listings/selecting-listing-duration?id=4652“Listings that run during a daylight saving time-change will still receive the full amount of the listing duration. For example, if you have a 1-day listing that starts at 1pm on Saturday, and the daylight saving time spring transition occurs that Saturday evening, the listing will end at 2pm on Sunday” For the last two or three clock changes it has not worked like this. Instead auctions have finished at the same local time as they have started, ie an auction starting at 7PM BST will finish after the clock change at 7PM GMT and vice versa if the clocks have gone forward. In the former case the auction will have run for 7 days and 1 hour, in the latter case for 6 days and 23 hours. You raised this with tech and they variously said that they were unable to see that it was happening, that it would resolve itself as the auctions ran and finally that it was fixed. Unfortunately that does not seem to be the case. I’m hoping you be able to have this looked into again please, and apologies for the amount of text here, I just wanted to make sure you were armed with is as much information when following this up! To illustrate what’s happening I set up two dummy auctions yesterday, one running for 5 days, so finishing while we are still in BST, and one running for 7 days, so finishing after the clocks have gone back This is the 5 day auction, started at 10:00 BSThttps://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/397172272352 In the screenshot note that after the auction has been running for 5 minutes it says time remaining ‘4d23h’ - this is what you normally see as soon as an auction has started - the time remaining in hours is rounded down. If we look at watchount.com we can see the auction starts and finishes at the same UTC time, 09:00 (UTC Is a global time standard effectively the same as GMT) https://www.watchcount.com/live/397172272352/-/all?site=EBAY_GBStart: 19-Oct-25 09:00:01 UTC Ends 24-Oct-25 09:00:01 UTCThis is the 7 day auction, started at 09:00 BST and finishing after clocks have gone backhttps://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/397170609622 This time in the screenshot taken after 5 minutes it says time remaining ‘7d0h’, because the duration has been rounded down from ‘7d1h’. You can see it says finishes 26/10 at 09:00, but does not specify BST or GMT (which will be in effect at the time). However when we look at watchcount.com we can see that this must be GMT, as the auction finishes at 09:00 UTC which equals 09:00 GMT. https://www.watchcount.com/live/397170609622/-/all?site=EBAY_GBStart: Sun, 19-Oct-25 08:00:01 UTC Ends Sun, 26-Oct-25 09:00:01 UTC The critical thing to note here is that the 5 day auction starts at 09:00 UTC and ends at 09:00 UTC, so runs for 5 x 24 hours exactly, whereas the 7 day auction starts at 08:00 UTC and ends at 09:00 UTC so runs for 7 x 24 hours plus one extra hour. If you could pass this on to tech to have them check it out that would be great, it would be really great to get this sorted out this year. Or alternatively is there someone else you could pass it on to, perhaps whoever is in charge of setting the policy who could then take up with tech why the current implementation is not matching the policy?

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Clock Change Bug Again - Auction Durations + 1 hour | Technical Issues | eBay UK