Here's the story

I truly hope the auction can recover from the mix-up and the relist. At least now you can search the ebay page and find it.

This is what happened:
Yesterday a couple of ebayers emailed me that offering partial proceeds to a charity without first listing the auction as a charity auction violates ebay policy and they might remove it. This concerned me, so I spent quite a bit of time looking into ways to change the listing and either adding the non-profit aspect or removing it from the posting. Well once there are bids you can add to an ebay listing but you cannot delete. So I was out of luck and was hoping the beneficient ebay gods would overlook this. They didn't. I got a call this am from ebay saying I had to change the listing or it would be removed. I called the number given 2 times, neither time could I get through to a living breathing human and neither one of my messages were returned. I was chatting with the live chat person, who was helpful, and it was in the middle of this discussion that the listing was removed. Gone. No trace. All the bids gone. No trace. Oh the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth! Not really, some choice cuss words and some scathing emails to my sister. I spent the next 4 hours trying to register to be able to do a non-profit charity auction and relist the item. No luck. Ebay would not recognize me as having registered. I looked into switching the auction to Yahoo! auctions. They could not give me a human being to talk to to make sure I followed the proper procedure [does nobody want this free publicity?]. Back to ebay. Screw the charity option on the auction. Know in my heart I will follow through-but-I-can't-be-anymore-specific-or-the-auction-might-get-pulled-again. Relist. Thankfully many people were still buzzing and emailing me about where the previous auction was so I could redirect. In the few hours it has been back up we have over $100 bid. Numerous hits.

I'm sure we have all worked and worked on something, only to have it disappear. For me it was a significant chunk of my dissertation. For a friend it was having her only copies of her masters thesis stolen out of her car. For my ancestors in South Dakota it was a big tornado. In the grand scheme of things, 2325 virtual dollars is a mere bump in the road; nothing compared to Darfur, the civil war in Congo, the loss of your entire peach crop, the slander of your good name by Imus. A life full of such little setbacks would be a life of ease. Just like the 6 million dollar man, we can rebuild it, we have the technology!

I sincerely apologize for the confusion and for those who have been frustrated by the dancing numbers. I did everything in my control to work with ebay to prevent the problem once it was brought to my attention, and I continue to work with them to make this auction a success.