Rejecting a mooch
February 7, 2008
I wanted to bring up a topic for conversation with my fellow Moochers, as I’m not sure how to proceed.
Namely, what are reasonably grounds for rejecting a mooch request?
I’ve seen two extremes on this topic, from quite reasonable, to downright nasty.
Two nasty examples that have been brought to my attention (these are real):
On the other hand, today I saw a blog entry that brought this topic into the foreground, namely:
In discussion with the volunteer admins, we decided some time ago we didn’t want BookMooch to be anyone’s political platform, and rejecting mooches because you don’t like Switzerland, or another person’s book tastes wasn’t what we wanted on BookMooch.
On the other hand, we did think that someone’s behavior on BookMooch was perhaps fair ground for rejecting a mooch, such as if they a requester had many books “lost in the mail” when sent to them.
I didn’t want BookMooch to become a free-for-all, where anyone could make up any personal reasons for accepting or rejecting a mooch. That could get nasty.
Furthermore, I’ve come out on my blog and other places pretty strongly in support of allowing bookstores, if they want to, to participate in BookMooch. The reason, simply, is that bookstores need to send out books other moochers want in order to earn their points, so they’re “playing fair”. And besides, I like small independent used book stores, and want them to survive.
So, we (the admins and I) came up with a very short list of acceptable reasons for rejecting mooches. You can’t reject a mooch because someone might sell the book you’re sending them, or because you don’t like their political views or their country. You can reject them because they behave badly on BookMooch, or because the postage costs would be too high.
But, are these hard-and-fast rules serving the BookMooch community best?
What do you think? How would you handle the case of the upset author?
-john
