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.
Bulk Active Content Scanner for eBay Listings
| 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 () |
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.
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
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.
