eBay users were "bleeping" on the company's discussion board today after discovering it had made an unannounced change to the way it displayed feedback.



In a threat titled, "What in the world happened to the Feedback view in the past half hour????" a seller "bleeped out" what he had said aloud upon first seeing the change on his feedback page and wrote, "Now, instead of seeing the date and time feedback is left or received, we see this: Past 1 month.



"Was this announced? Is this supposed to be an "improvement?" Were actual eBay programmers' resources redirected to come up with this? I'm very diligent about keeping track of my feedback. I don't like this one bit. Can someone explain the rhyme or reason for it?"







The change makes it harder to identify trading partners since eBay has removed the date that the feedback was left and replaced it with very general time periods, including "Past 1 month."



For instance, a buyer wrote, "I was just trying to find a past seller by going through my feedback list on past auctions/purchases but it seems you have made a change that makes this one simple task very hard if not impossible."



Sellers were also unhappy about the surprise change. "My first thought is that now we have no idea when exactly the buyer left feedback. Is it after the 45 days post transaction allowed by eBay?? We will have no way of knowing that. Soon a buyer will be able to leave feedback anytime after the transaction. Year or two later? Sure, blast away at the seller."



Another user said the change was "just as bad back when eBay removed the Item Description line from the Feedback Profile entries."



And another wrote, "They are just making it harder to see if FB is deserved or not. First they scrambled the buyers' IDs so we couldn't see if they were serial neggers. Now, they remove the date so we can't check to see if that "slow shipping" neg was actually deserved. *eye roll*"



As readers have pointed out, this is the latest in a series of changes eBay has made to make the site less transparent. We've got a request into eBay PR for more information.



Let us know what you think of the change, and tell us how it impacts you.

