What happened with Roma last night?

Due to the time change between Australia and London, before I went to bed I reviewed my current e-bids on Roma as they only had a couple hours left. I made the hard decision of passing on the ones I had been out bid on and then increasing my maximum on the select few that I thought I had a chance of winning. I went to sleep hoping to wake up with a few more coins added to my collection.

To my surprise whilst I was asleep and with only a couple hours left to go on the auction Roma decided to add 7 more days to the auction!!! Have never seen this type of insanity before. However, They were courteous enough to send an email only a couple hours before they did this stating a correction was now in place.



I guess now that I put my best bids in everyone has another 7 days to ponder over it and increase the price.

Does anyone else find this odd?

 

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It may be a genuine website problem or otherwise they are just scattering more bait for the big fish to drive up the prices.

 

Just chatting with a friend of mine this morning, he is as shocked as I was. He didn’t even receive the correction email.

 

I dont trust roma. Heard so many sketchy stories like this... anecdotes as they may be.

 

I was trying to access the auction earlier and was getting a server error. Their site genuinely crashed. They sold the first 483 lots, as it says in the first email. I can't see any reason why they would do this deliberately, Roma E Sales are always very popular and get good hammer prices - the site going down during an auction is surely more likely to have a long term negative impact on their business. Even the 'big' auction houses like Roma probably only have a small IT/technical department so it's not unbelievable for this kind of problem to happen.

 

I received the same notice you got. Those people have their heads up their you no what .

 

These things happen. I had the same bad experience last summer with CGB; technology is not 100% reliable...
https://www.cointalk.com/threads/nightmare-at-the-auction.384156/

 

This has happened with Roma before. Last time it happened it seemed like bidding was noticeably weaker once the auction actually resumed, which was nice even if the whole affair was annoying.

A similar thing happened with the recent Artemide auction however they only pushed the auction out 1 day and prices were still quite strong.

 

I had a number of back-and-forth emails with them this morning. It looks like their service went offline, then their web server started returning 500's. The first failure they attributed to a hardware failure.

Typically 500's are returned when a service dependency is down and their service has no logic to recover. Likely the hardware failure took down the dependency or connection to the dependency, and when they brought the hardware back up, the dependency was not.

Initially they sent a mail stating they would resume bidding in 5 minutes, but then moved it to next Friday. My assumption is they didn't want to lose face by continuously providing updates, so they just gave themselves ample time to ensure their service and all of its dependencies are up.

Admittedly, I'm not familiar with their infrastructure, but I'm a bit surprised that their architecture isn't using redundancy. The nature of their operations lends itself very well to cloud scaling. They know the exact times of their auctions and can simply scale up before, then scale down afterwards. It certainly seems like they're not cloud-based, which doesn't make much sense today.

I must admit I'm a bit bummed. I did win one of my targets before the issue occurred, and their mail made it clear I still won that one. However, I have another major target later, and I'm worried that the extra time will allow bids to go higher than my budget.

 

Thought I'd check the status of my bids, so I went to the Roma website. When I tried to login, I kept getting the message: "Something went wrong, Please try again."

 

They have a lot of server problems when auctions are live. Sometimes I wonder if someone doesn't attempt to launch a DDoS at the same time their targeted lot closes to try to block the snipers from getting it.

 

I was watching waiting for my lots to come up, Byzantine is always later in the day. They stopped when things went array, sent out an email that it would resume after a 5 min delay, then I was unable to get to the catalog, only home. In fact the only way in the catalog was via the one coin I had pre bid on, they finally gave up and sent another email auction pas lots 480 would resume Nov 5th. Disappointing but what point is it to have an auction if you cannot bid.

 

I doubt a client with such resources would bother to do that for such low value lots. It's anyway not possible to predict when the attack would block the system. However, cyberattacks are often ordered by competitors. Who are the competitors? Other auctioneers and bidding platforms. The former have an interest to defame them and gain consignors. The latter to push them to use one of the platforms instead of their own live system.

 

Am I the only one here that is searching for a correlation between the Artemide and the ROMA server issues? Just saying that it seems awfully coincidental ..........

 

Roma doesn't use their own system. Just view their page source and it's obvious they use Auction Marketer. According to their site, they're SaaS software - so it doesn't seem that Roma hosts their own bidding servers, and a bit more research indicates they're on AWS.

I've never bid with Artemide, and a quick look at their source indicates they use something other than Auction Marketer.

I'm not sure who actually hosts www.romanumismatics.com - whether it's Roma or Auction Marketer. That's the service that was returning a 500. However, given the fact that I had a page open but was unable to bid - my guess is the bug is on Auction Marketer, since that request should have gone straight to them regardless.

 

Roma has pretty high value lots in some of their e-sales sometimes. Lot of elecrum staters, for example, which can go for around 3k gbp

 

I thought I had lost track of their auction date or was suffering from old age dementia. WHEW....what a relief!!! Not professional but as it is Roma, nothing would surprise me.

I echo your sentiments. Have had nothing but bad experience with Roma, buying and selling. They don't describe the lots accurately, I would even go so far as saying they deliberately overlook issues and included my lots in an auction when I specifically asked them not to. Very cocky and arrogant attitude. They need to learn there are much bigger and better players in the market, Heritage being one that stands out. They even had the audacity of charging an additional amount for third party charges on top of 20% BP. Most of the US based auction houses seem to have a much more professional and client friendly attitude IMHO.

 

Hi Najib, long time no see! I am surprised you are writing this, as you bought plenty of Lysimachos Tetradrachms from them in the last few years and you were extremely happy and satisfied! What changed?

 

That was a rare happy experience. I also bought some denarii and aurii from them, most of which had issues, never mentioned in their listings so I decided not to even visit Roma's site for a couple of years. This year I tried to sell some stuff through them and it was not a happy experience at all.

I compare them to people like Heritage, Great Collections, CNG etc. Those auction houses are much more reputable. I don't like being charged for things not agreed in advance, irrespective of the amount. Moreover, I requested them not to list some of my nicer consigned items to an E-Sale and they told me point blank that they decided where they would list the items. When I asked to withdraw those items from the sale, they said they would charge 20% of their estimates even if I withdrew them. Obviously they are making enough money and don't care about repeat customers. Good for them!!!

 

Sorry to hear this, Najib! What were you selling, if you dont mind me asking? That Dekadrachm that you bought from GC?