Good News about the Back Button issue

Good news for IE users who've experienced a problem using the Back button on eBay  -- we believe a bug fix that rolled last night has resolved the problem for the majority of our members. (There may be very specific circumstances in which it is still happening that our teams are still working on.) If you are still having the issue, please post to our Technical issues board to help us.  Let us know the steps you took, so our tech teams can recreate what you are experiencing. 

Please read on for more detail about the Back Button issue....

I know when I'm busy, it's the little inconveniences that drive me crazy -- My Outlook mailbox is suddenly full (alright, who sent a 10mb file??) and I can't send an urgent email without spending time archiving things -- I can't get Word to format a long document quite right -- My password expires and, before I can get to that important file I need, I have to spend 10 minutes thinking of a unique password that meets all the myriad security requirements AND is something I can actually manage to type twice the same way without taking off my shoes and socks.....*sigh*  It's always the little things.

For several weeks, members have been posting about the Back button not working reliably on eBay pages for people using Internet Explorer.  This "little thing" has grown into something more serious as time has gone by without a resolution.  Frustration levels have understandably increased.

The situation is this -- you are on Search results, you click into a listing to check it out, you take some action -- like place a bid, put it on your Watch list, etc -- then you try to return to your Search results with the Back button.....that's where it fails.  If you don't happen to know about the workaround (you can use the little Back button drop down arrow, which can take you to a previous page you were on recently), you are stuck and have to start your search over.

One member put it this way -- "I too have been having this problem for about a month. Drives me crazy. Makes me not want to take a closer look at an item, because I know I will have to start the search all over again. Any updates on the problem?” 

The issue also came up yesterday at Bill Cobb's Town Hall, and one of Bill's panelists, Matt Carey, eBay's Chief Technology Officer, promised the community that the issue was very close to being fixed.  In a chat I had with Sonny, one of our eWatch managers -- the people who serve as liaisons between the community and our operations/engineering staff on technical issues -- this has been on our radar for several weeks.  Unfortunately, like some things are, this glitch has been an elusive one to track down and isolate to a root cause (in this case there were at least two different issues involved).

But the good news, as I said, is that our engineers think it's fixed.  Thanks to those of you who have commented on the boards -- our teams really do read the forums and often are alerted to issues that way.