Two more ideas via email:

• Show the parters that sent (or should have sent) to you after one month (at the same time the “nag” emails stop)
• Once you click “I sent my items”, the swap gets moved to the “Previous Swaps” section

See No Evil, Hear No Evil

Both great ideas and unless someone tells me otherwise, I am going to get to them sometime soon. Thanks Robyn.

Now that I have gotten some of the little things that Swap-bot needed out of the way, I am ready to focus on a bigger Swap-bot project. I have already started working on a swap photo gallery and member pages.

The member pages are going to be a place where swappers can share info about themselves, like their favorite color or favorite type of music, for swap parters to get possible swap ideas. The member pages will have a place for comments from other swappers and all uploaded images by that user. I have heard from some users that they would like to be able to rank fellow swappers. This would probably be the place for that, I am still working out what exactly could be ranked and how other parts of Swap-bot could use that information.

I am most excited about the photo gallery. Each swap will have its own photo gallery that anyone can view. Swappers would, most likely, upload photos of the swaps they receive (technically they could upload pics of the swaps they send, but that detail will be left up to the swap coordinator). This might be a good place to have some voting. Swappers could vote on the best swap package or something.

Any ideas or feedback regarding member pages and photo galleries would be most appreciated. Thanks.

Changes made tonight:

• SB now sends a reminder email one week in advance to the close of the swap signup
• Added a “Drop from swap” link at the top of the swap details page if you are signed up for the swap
• Fixed a “Forgot my password” error where the text of the email was being displayed before the email was sent (ooops…)

The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginning psp About Last Night… rip

Update: I got the “nag” email reminders setup. For the first month following the end of the swap, anyone who hasn’t clicked the “I sent my items” link will receive a daily email from Swap-bot letting them know they need to send their items.

I received some e-mail feedback from a swapper that said she wouldn’t want to know who she was receiving her stuff from. She said she wouldn’t have the guts to email her partner asking where the goods are. I completely agree. I know I wouldn’t email my bad swap partner either. And it makes it more fun to get a package in the mail completely unexpected.

So, that got me thinking. What does everyone think of a link that automatically emails your swap partner telling them you didn’t get your package? A downside that I can think of, is that if the swap has multiple partners, all the partners would get the email, even the ones that might have sent their items. I know I could look at who says they sent their items, but can we really trust that since it is just a link that someone clicks that says they sent their stuff?

I’ve talked with a few swappers and am going to implement some of the emails mentioned in a previous post. One week in advance everyone will get an email reminding them they are in the swap and if they can’t follow through with the commitment of the swap they need to drop out. Everyone will still get the current email the day after signup closes telling them to look at their swap partners. And as soon as the swap deadline sends, anyone that has not clicked the “I sent my items” link will get emails everyday reminding them to send out their stuff.

By far the biggest problem we currently have with swap-bot is how to handle people that don’t send their swap items. This is something I don’t know the answer to.

There are a few ways we can go about identifying bad swappers and I will go over that shortly, but first we have to decide what we are going to actually do to bad swappers. If we ban them from all swaps for the rest of eternity, they will just sign up with a different email address and start swapping again. If we don’t do anything, they’ll keep getting swaps and not sending them. I’m open to suggestions here.

One solution to identify bad swappers would be to provide each person in the swap with a list of people that are sending swap items to them. They could then check off who they got something from and who they didn’t. This option potentially takes away some of the fun of a random swap. By seeing the list you then know who is sending you stuff. So maybe we hold off showing the list for 2 weeks or a month after the close of a swap. Again please leave suggestions.

The solution that I think I am going to attempt first is to send a few more reminder emails to all swappers and inundate the bad swappers with reminder/warning emails. I plan on sending the following emails:

• One week prior to close – A reminder that you are in the swap and you can still drop it if you aren’t going to send your items
• The day after signup for the swap closes – An email letting swappers know they can now view the people they send their swap items to
• Daily (every other day, weekly, I don’t know yet) emails to people that have not clicked the “I sent my items” link for the swap.

The last email will hopefully will make bad senders follow through with their commitment to the swap. Since they will only be able to make the emails stop sending by clicking the link on the swap page, hopefully they will send their items. I am tossing around the idea of having a second way to stop the “late” reminder emails. I am thinking of putting a second link in the email that says something like, “I do not plan on sending my swap items. Please make these emails stop.” If the swapper clicks this link, an email will get sent to everyone in the swap letting everyone know that this swapper let the entire swap down. The email would say who didn’t get their items as a result of this person choosing to not send their items. How’s that for a little public humiliation.

Please share any other ideas on the this subject or any others related to swap-bot.

For starters, a suggestion I received via email this weekend:

The only suggestion I have is that you institute some way of recognizing partners that don’t keep up their end of the bargain. I clicked the “Sent” button, perhaps you could add a “Received” button as well, which would then track against those who reported sending their swap. And, if a person slips up, you would prohibit them from signing up for any other swap until they met their first commitment. Just a thought.

I got an email from Amy (our most prolific swap coordinator) yesterday and she told me:

i did get the e-mail reminder, but it seemed when you clicked on the link inside it didn’t take you to a helpful place.

I went to the link that swap participants got and couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t helpful. I logged out and went to the link again. I then realized that if you view the swap details page without being logged in you can’t see the link to view your swap partners. Anyways, tonight I changed the link that gets sent out in the emails. If the participant is not logged in when they go to the swap details page, they are redirected to the login page. After logging in, the are then redirected back to the swap details page.

I just added an RSS 2.0 feed for the 10 most recent swaps at swap-bot. Subscribe and enjoy.

I’ve started a swap-bot development blog a few times before but it never really took off because I didn’t have anything to say. I wasn’t at the stage I am now in development before. I finally have a good foundation built for swap-bot and am now fixing small bugs and releasing new features. This blog will be used to announce and discuss new features and find and resolve bugs… stay tuned.