NOT Shopping On eBay

I wanted to, honest. I had a very particular item in mind I wanted to replace, and knowing it was older, thought eBay might stand a chance of having it. I've been shopping there for decades, as long as I had a computer capable of doing so and a card accepted by PayPal.

By now I'm convinced if I had searched that item, I'd start to see ads blocking all  kinds of non-commercial sites  by covering patches of the data or information I wanted to look at. It just happened to me a couple days ago with ads on a different item (SHAME ON YOU, ETSY!) on my usual local weather site, the one which has local radar, even if it gets it wrong on the boundaries of where rain is actually falling. These days I have to do a really quick view of high and low temperatures for today and tomorrow , or they'll be covered with ads. Every time I pull it up! It normally offers ten day information on a chart, and hourly information for the current day on a different chart. I can't view them anymore, or maybe get just  one set of numbers before they're covered.

I was a bit reluctant to check on eBay, but figured what I wanted to replace might just narrowly be there if it could be found anywhere. It might be worth the risk of being flooded by unstoppable ads.  But now  this new frustration from eBay prevented any search at all. I couldn't even get on the site.

First it asked me to click in a small box to "prove" I was human. I did. It asked again. I did again. Usually one was enough, but now two? OK, that should do it. Right?

Nope!

Next I got the box of squares with fuzzy photos in them asking me to click in each one that fits in a category. I'm used to "all the bicycles" or "all the buses". 

This time the pictures were fuzzy. One had a spray bottle, no kind of label so I'd know what it had inside, and asked me to click on all the squares I'd use the bottle on. First, I don't have nor use spray bottles. So many of the squares were too fuzzy to properly identify -was that a flower a vase or pot in front of a pretty setting? Or a picture of one? Why would I spray either one? Neither with a cleaner, possibly yes if it held water but absolutely not if it were a picture. There were also possible buildings or tools or toys like Legos. My guess was they were hard plastic toys and I might spray them if I were one of those germaphobes who went around sanitizing my kids total world. Whatever I tried, it didn't work and I got too disgusted with the stupidity of the game to bother trying to use the website. 

Sorry eBay. If you can't figure out how to separate actual paying customers from cons or unbridled AI, giving the humans a reasonable chance with clear pictures, you really don't need my business. Your sellers lose out. Your potential buyers - like me - go elsewhere or decide whatever they're shopping for just isn't that important.