¶ What is an Infinite Spinner?
Infinite Spinner (sometimes abbreviated as 'IS') an issue on the Amazon Vine program that - as its name may suggest - shows a spinner that spins infinitely in its effort to populate the page with product details. However, this is a futile process that lasts indefinitely as it is technically a 'broken' feature of Amazon Vine currently. This issue is also not region-specific, meaning it can affect Amazon Vine members from anywhere.
¶ How does the Infinite Spinner Fix work?
Fortunately, with the installation of Vine Helper, the fixes for Infinite Spinners are performed automatically. There is also no specific configuration or setting changes required to activate this feature.
You will know when the Infinite Spinner Fix is activated after you click on the See details button for an item with this specific issue. Upon getting the 'Product Details' pop-up page, you will see the green-bordered pop-up message saying "Vine Helper magical fixing in progress..." with a bunch of animated green plus signs like this:
There will also be a pop-up message from the Vine Helper extension in the bottom-right corner of the browser window stating that the fix was activated and implemented.
With this simple process, the Infinite Spinner Fix allows the user to request an item that would otherwise not have been accessible as is (i.e. using Amazon Vine without an extension). The positive with using Vine Helper is that the Infinite Spinner Fix does not have to override any security measures of "inject codes" into Amazon servers to achieve this.
After the animation, you are free to proceed as normal and you are able to request items like any other unaffected listings. The sellers are not notified nor will they be aware of the fix being used to request their products.
¶ Types of Infinite Spinners
While not all sources of infinite spinners are currently known or discovered, most infinite spinner issues seem to point to restrictions caused by item variants or the labels associated with them. By resolving incorrect or problematic variant labels, the Infinite Spinner Fix helps to avoid Amazon Vine's internal code to crash, literally, when trying to process the data (or rather, lack thereof) upon request.
This page is a work-in-progress. Due to how taciturn Amazon is on how Vine works yet how sporadic infinite spinner issues can be, not all root causes of infinite spinners have been identified. As a result, some infinite spinner issues may still be present with Vine Helper. As more are discovered, this page will be updated to reflect the dev team's findings.
¶ Infinite Spinner 1: Missing Variants
The first infinite spinner issue ("Type 1") is the one that causes the majority of the infinite spinners: when sellers do not provide proper variant information in the product listing (e.g. colour, size, model, type, dimensions, etc.). Vine Helper's Infinite Spinner Fix resolves this by providing the product's ASIN as the "variant" in the label's place.
¶ Infinite Spinner 2: Special Characters
The second infinite spinner issue ("Type 2") seems to be caused by (but not all) special characters that appear in the drop-down menus or titles of product listings. This issue is relatively new, and the root cause is not 100% known as of yet.
The special characters currently identified as being problematic are:
- Parentheses
() - Brackets
[] - Colons
: - Ampersands
&
Vine Helper's Infinite Spinner Fix resolves this by removing the aforementioned characters when encountering them. While this may create false-positives, it is fixing some of these "Type 2" spinners.
¶ Infinite Spinner 3: Duplication of Black-1 Variants
The third infinite spinner issue ("Type 3") is still under investigation to verify its plausibility.
It is alleged that some product colours that are listed as black-1 and black could be seen as having the same name which causes the "Product Details" pop-up page to fail to load completely.