Travis and I were working on the Swap-bot site yesterday. You may have noticed a few glitches overnight, but things should be back to normal today.

In addition to some much-needed text editing, we released three new major changes:

ratingfilterscreenshot

  • Rating Filter for Swaps – As part of our overall plan to make hosting swaps easier, we have implemented an optional rating filter for swaps. Now, when a coordinator creates a new swap, they have the option to choose an automatic rating filter. (The image above show how the new option appears on the swap creation page.) Hosts can now enter a rating limit (say, 4.8) and participants will automatically be screened according to that limit. If a user does not meet the rating requirement, they will not be able to enter the swap. Hosts can also choose whether they want to allow new users with no ratings in the swap. If the “Manual rating filter” option is picked, the swap will proceed as usual and any unsuspended user will be able to sign up. Hosts will then need to manually suspend any users who do not meet their requirements. Even if the auto rating filter is used, we still strongly suggest that hosts still check over their participant lists before assigning partner to check for profile or address issues.</li>

    • Country Standardization – We have started the process of standardizing all countries within member addresses. 90% of all users’ countries have already been standardized automatically, but you may be asked to pick a country from a drop down list when you next log into Swap-bot. The standardization of countries will allow us to start working on an automatic location filtering system for regional swaps. Look for that feature when creating swaps in the near future!

    • New User Limit Changes – We have tightened the new user swap sign up limit slightly: All new users of Swap-bot start with a swap sign up limit and can only sign up for five swaps at a time at first. This limit lasts until they have completed five swaps (i.e. marked them all as “Sent” once their packages are in the mail) and received five positive (5) ratings from their swap partners. (The ratings can be from five individual swaps or all from one swap with multiple partners.) Once a user has met these requirements, the limit is removed and they can sign up for as many as twenty swaps at a time. Previously, the five swap sign up limit only lasted until the user received three “5” ratings. We noticed that some scammers were quickly getting around the limit by signing up for one e-swap with many partners. Hopefully, this change will slow them down and give us time to catch them before damage is done. The change should not affect experienced users, except for the fact that it will help make swapping a little bit safer. </li> </ul>

      These changes are not very drastic and we have edited the FAQ and other text pages to reflect the new info. As always, let us know if you have any questions or notice any problems.