esshup you set it up how it works best for you, but in my experience being involved in silent auctions before, there was a value to having it truly 'silent' Meaning for sure it is better if you do not know who you are bidding against (keep silent who the high bidder is on any particular item) and in some cases it was even good to keep the top bid silent too! That way if you really wanted it you had to go high and hope you went high enough.
But since there are multiples of the same thing, then not all the flies will go for the same price.
So perhaps you number them as in JKB's posting.
Then you open bidding (now, or at some appointed time) and every 2-4 hours or so you just post what each fly bid is up to. You pick a close time and maybe post every 10-15 min in the last hour or if the bids are going up furiously.
If the bidders at the PB get together have a white board or marker board with a running tally of the totals then they can see progress from silent bidders who are not there. Those present can submit slips of paper with their bidder number or name into a closed box or simply hand them to you and every so often those bids are added to the tally sheet that is posted. You will have a paper trail from bids from those at the conference and in your private message box from those of us who are not.
Those of us not there can send you a private message adding our bids and you can update the marker board or posted scorecard. You could take a picture of the score sheet or marker board to make it easy to keep us posted on what the bids are up to on each fly.
At our school auction that i was involved with over several years we had 2 bid rooms with stuff, one had a white board with item numbers and the current bid and we submitted paper bids with only the current total going up on the marker board. The other room worked like this and then in the last 15 min of the auction the current value that the item was going for was hidden so people had some idea where they were at but then had to just pick a number well above that and hope they won
For what the ideas are worth...
