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Bulk Active Content Scanner for eBay Listings

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Seller Name (required)
eBay Site (required)
ADVANCED SEARCH SETTINGS
Keyword search:
Site Categories Sort Order Listing Type

Custom search phrase may be verbatim text; or it may be regex formatted to include the bounding slashes and at least one parenthetical grouping, of the form: /(…)/i
WARNING  Avoid large scans on older or underpowered systems (like XP or mobile devices). If you have more than 5000 items to scan, close other applications and browser tabs to ensure adequate memory is available. The scan is most intensive at the end as it builds the summaries, and may appear to freeze while doing so. You may need to allow up to 5 minutes for summaries to settle on scans of 10,000 items, which typically take about a half hour to complete.

...item list will display here...
Scan Summary
Informational only. Checkmark columns to include in Summary and update Summary on left for your own use.
Summary () No Scan () OK () Active () Non-eBay () Targets () SSL () Widgets () Custom () No Custom ()

Scan your eBay listings in bulk with this Active Content checker:

The easiest way to determine whether you have Active Content in your listings is to bulk scan them. Spending several minutes on an autoscan will save days of guesswork.

LEGEND:

This scan is informational only. The tool will scan items found publicly on eBay without accessing your account, and can not search out-of-stock items or adult items, since those items are not publicly viewable. The tool will advise which of your listings contain Active Content. A different tool, the ActiveContentEditor, will assist in bulk modifying listings.

This tool can scan up to 10,000 items (approx 500 items per minute). Use the search criteria to reduce the search range if you have more than 10,000 items, thus creating subgroupings based on category, price, or date order.

This tool will also accept an input list from File Exchange, which can retrieve adult, out-of-stock, and greater then 10,000 items.
 

Overlaps If scanning while listings are being added or removed, the results may have overlaps or gaps in data returned from eBay, as the tool will be retrieving from a moving target. The overlaps are captured here to adjust the totals, and you can ignore them. The gaps can only be captured by a subsequent scan at a later time.

Untested This tool will build a list of up to 10,000 active items. All untested item rows will remain purple. Any that remain purple after the scan has completed have encountered a scan problem. Try scanning those items individually in the ActiveContentSandbox tool. If the scan stalls on a page, click the next page number to skip the problem and continue the scan.

No Serious Issues When no Active Content, non-eBay links, SSL issues, or Target issues are found in an item, its row will turn white. That item complies with eBay's Rules and recommendations for those four issues. The tool does not test for Contact Information, which is yet another removal mandate from eBay.

Mandates The row will turn red if these issues are found
  •  Active Content is found.
  •  Non-eBay Links are found.
  •  Links are missing target="_blank" or supply a wrong target.

Active content is often just a block of code from an inserted widget, but some templates incorporate scripts as design elements. You can view Active Content code in colorized detail in the ActiveContentSandbox tool.

Non-SSL If embedded media is hosted on a non-secure server (http instead of https), the row will turn orange. This eBay recommendation to change the hosting protocol affects only the display of the page. It is optional and is not yet an eBay mandate.

Widgets/credits (Not activated) If user-selectable widgets and credits have been chosen for removal, the row will turn yellow. These are typically optional cleanups and not part of any eBay mandate.

Custom For advanced users. If a Custom Capture phrase is entered, items returned by eBay's search will be further examined for that phrase (useful for detecting content within HTML or script, or an email address or phone number). Any item containing that custom phrase will be added to a summary list, and will not affect the Active Content filters or row displays.   details

After the items have been returned by eBay's standard search filters, this tool will additionally scan those descriptions for your custom search phrase. This can be useful for grouping your updates by type of template or hosting service.

A single line of plain text or code will be found exactly as formatted, and will be case insensitive. Be wary of choosing text that might have embedded formatting tags, or else include the tags as part of your text, for example:
  We do not accept returns
  We do <strong>not</strong> accept returns
  photobucket.com
This tool will also support Regex (Regular Expression) wildcards for locating larger blocks or multiple configurations. The regex must be grouped within parentheses, and be further bounded by slashes "/", with a trailing (optional) "i" designator for "ignore case". This specific configuration will tell this tool that you have a regex. Regex examples are:
  /(returns (are )?not (accepted|allowed))/i
  /(\<script[\s\S]+?\<\/script\>)/i
  /((photobucket.com|inkfrog.com)[^>]+?\.(jpg|gif|png))/i
Since Regex filters can be tricky to create, it is wise to load a single listing and tweak your regex with one item before starting a scan of hundreds or thousands of items, only to discover the filter was inadequate or malformed.

No Custom Additionally, if a custom phrase is entered, any item that does not contain that phrase will be added to the No-Custom list, but will not be marked in the grid.

Summary It may be helpful to display only those item rows that contain issues of interest, thus checkboxes appear across the resulting columns below the scan. Because listings may contain more than one issue, a listing may appear in more than one column. So all listing numbers from checkmarked columns are aggregated in the Summary column for your convenience. The totals are merely advisory, and checkmarking a column performs no function except helping you aggregate totals.


The will appear on an individual row so that you may examine the description code in detail. The button will open that item in the ActiveContentSandbox tool where all the detected codes will be highlighted for your information, and you will be provided an option to strip out those codes for low volume hand editing. Or, if you want to manipulate the codes yourself, the Sandbox tool will allow you to experiment with filtering and replacing blocks of text.


The button will open the item in eBay's listing editor, where eBay's "Description Checker" tool will allow you to fix listings one at a time. If a small number of rows are highlighted in color, and you are generally aware of what types of issues have been found, you may want to allow eBay to fix those items for you. eBay's Active Content removal tool will remove active content and will add the target attribute to listings that are missing that attribute.


Use the button to compile a summary of all scan row results that can be used in a spreadsheet. Copy the data and paste into a text file on your computer. Name the file with a .csv suffix to automatically open in a spreadsheet.




API calls: 
Listings scanned: 
Scans Per Hour: 
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