Very large bids

[bamse]

Just ran a test auction on an offline site.

Apparently there are some strange things happening if one enters very large amounts.

As seller I received an email stating a bid of 10^49 EUR. Obviously this creates an automatic/proxy bid.

Afterwards wherever the current bid amount appears on the site or in emails it says 99,999,999.99 (i.e. 100 Million). Additional bids (below 10^49 don't change this number either.

I understand that no serious person would be willing to spend that much, but in order to prevent fake accounts having some fun, it might be worth limiting the maximum amount.

[RWAP]

I guess if you do sell something for that amount, at least you will be able to pay to fix the bug in the code !!

Mind you if inflation takes off as it has in the past, if that was in euros, it could well be worth about £1000 - who knows.

The issue relates to the SQL database where the bid, current price etc fields are set to double(10,2), that means 10 digits with 2 after a decimal point.

Hence the maximum which could be stored in the database is indeed 99,999,999.99

The better solution, rather than setting a maximum bid limit, would be to increase the permitted size of the field in the database.

[bamse]

Thanks for the reply. In some other currency 100 Million might not be all that much even without inflation. So, while it would not affect us at the moment (as we have Euro), it might be a problem for somebody else.

Also, it could be an issue if fake buyer accounts are bidding that much.