Expiry and Collecting Items

Every listing has an end time. What happens when it passes is designed so that an item is never lost.

Timeline

Moment	What happens
The listing is live	Visible in the main auction to everyone, and can be bought
The end time passes	The listing disappears from the main auction, search and QuickBuy at once, and can no longer be bought. Only the owner still sees it, in My Listings marked (expired)
Within about a minute	A background check records the expiry (log and Discord webhook), then returns the item to its owner if they are online
The owner is offline	The listing waits. When they join, the item is returned automatically
Collecting by hand	The owner can always click the expired entry in My Listings, or use Take All

Automatic return

With auto-return-expired: true (the default):

• If the owner is online, the item is put in their inventory and the listing is removed, with a chat message
• If the owner is offline, the same happens when they join
• The check runs about once a minute, so it retries until it succeeds

Set auto-return-expired: false if you would rather owners collect expired items themselves from My Listings.

When the inventory is full

Items are never dropped on the ground when an expired item is returned or a listing is removed. If the item will not fit:

• The listing stays exactly as it is, still collectable
• The player is told to free some space and try again
• Automatic return simply retries on the next pass

Collecting by hand

In My Listings:

• Click an expired entry to take the item back
• Take All returns every expired item (and claims sold items too)

An item only leaves the listing once it has room in the inventory. Two clicks at once can never hand out the item twice.

How long things are kept

purge-after-days decides how long an uncollected expired item or unclaimed sale is kept:

Value	Behaviour
0 (default)	Kept forever. Nothing is ever dropped
A number of days	After that many days past the expiry (or sale), the entry is no longer loaded when the server starts

Nothing is ever deleted from the database. The purge only stops old entries from being loaded, and it applies at startup, not while the server is running. Setting the value back to 0 makes the older entries visible again on the next restart. Entries created while it was 0 are marked as never-purge, so a later change only affects entries created after it.

Other kinds of listing

• Admin listings (/auction admin sell) have no owner to return an item to, so an expired one is simply removed
• Server listings created by the Random Auction add-on belong to the server, not a player, so there is nothing to return to anyone

Related settings

Setting	Default	Meaning
auto-return-expired	true	Return expired items automatically
purge-after-days	0	Days to keep uncollected items and unclaimed earnings; 0 = forever
notify-expired-on-join	true	Mention expired listings in the join message
listing-duration	10080	How long new listings last, in minutes