Absolutely - as I stated a few weeks/months ago in another thread on this subject - if you have even an auto refresh that is working when you are not around - it could easily overload their servers. Worse is when their security and programs are breached to ignore their time guidelines and pick orders before they are actually sent.

I think we all understand that clearly, and it is their game. My thinking is that if everyone just used their auto refresh when they were actually working - it would not be so bad. But any software that pings a site every 120.8536 seconds will be pretty easy to detect.

I actually may not work longer and harder than you. I'm just not much of a morning person, I'm more of a night owl. I've been that way since my first memories. I remember it blowing my parent's minds when I got up in the middle of the night when I was in kindergarten. There not being much to do at that hour for a kid my age I decided to embrace my fascination with science (?). I had seen my dad with the shaving cream and didn't understand how so much volume could come out of a small can. I was going to get to the bottom of it and see just how much would come out of that little can. Mom woke up to me filling the toilet bowl with foam.

I'm only slightly more productive with the time these days.

My son is motivated enough trying to get to be primary vendor that he sometimes stays up to 2 am to get M2M blasts.

(dont' know why the heck they feel the need to send them out at that hour but works for him!)

Unfortunately they usually only blast my areas about twice a month.....I'd be up a lot of days before I'd get any orders!

I saw the same thing with m2m last night as with other nights. I spoke to them by phone regarding auto accept and they said it's a no-no but my belief is it's obviously still in full use.

..and yes they are all probably out to get me too

and for those who don't understand the technical aspects of a "ping" it's basically what often crashes websites when hackers due a denial of service attack on a website. Websites can handle a finite amount of traffic, and the auto accept programs are treated as the same as a person clicking on the site. The difference is that with the auto except traffic, once enough agents start using it, the traffic gets so heavy the sites slow down or even crash, much like happens on Black Monday after Thanksgiving. Thats why the mills are not going to like the auto accept software, it overloads their Internet connections, keeping the agents AND the clients who place the orders. Just think, if you are a client, and trying to place an order, and Mill "A" site is slow, sluggish or not there, you just go to Mill "B" and place the order.

Once the volume of auto-accept starts impacting the sites, especially clients being able to place orders, more and more companies will ban the programs. And it's rather easy to find what agents are using the auto accept software.

"it's rather easy to find what agents are using auto accept" for us or the companies? I think there's a certain amount of poetic justice in just sitting back and not dropping the dime on these agents. Let them have their fun thinking they're gaming the system and when they are terminated should I feel bad?

BTW, where do I go to learn how to compartmentalize a quote or post. I don't know how to do that...

Go to the bottom right of the post that interests you and look for the quote button..

Thanks Tri really appreciate the explanation. I hope that means that eventually things may go back to normal.

It's very easy for the companies to figure out which agents are using the software because they have the data on their hands. Either the agent is *always* checking for orders or checking for orders in a specific interval. Or even both.

The software is cheap.........can it screw up my computer? I wouldn't even consider it except that my losses from one company are huge........do I call them and ask them if I can use the software?? ( I would quess if they fire me it's the same as my not getting any orders, right?)

test...

Thanx SMG...

I'm kind of getting to feel like TB with this subject but I heard this morning that 3 different companies are following the IP address of those who are "pinging" them and giving them "the boot"...

For the companies, not us. I have no clue what agents are using auto accept. But every time you "ping" or connect to the vendor's site, some basic info is included, like your IP address (which, while technically can change, rarely does for most US broadband users, I've had the same IP address for about 3 years now) and the date/time sent. This is logged. So you just look in the log, see who is connecting every couple of seconds, all day long, and they've found you.

On the same note, they can also see if someone logs into the same account from two different IP's, which could set off a flag that the account may have someone doing data entry. And if multiple accounts, especially geographically diverse accounts all log in from same IP address, then that's a big red flag of date entry service being used.

All this is from my pre-real estate days. We had a client who had subscriptions to a website, and suspected people were sharing login accounts. With a few days of monitoring logs, we'd found multiple subscribers sharing logins.

Next trick is the 'edit' button down by the 'quote' button and also the 'preview post' button down by the 'submit'

Then you can edit your post instead of testing in a thread and you can see how it will look with the preview post button without even needing to test it. Trust me - we all find these things out a little at a time