Very happy to have found you, I tell everyone I know-we’re all readers.

Keep the charts coming, John.

Sincerely,
LMO

I do live in a town with a gloriously wonderful library system.

Best,

Evy

http://www.bookmooch.com/m/inventory/evy47

I think a lot of people who are listed as ‘Ask first’ don’t really WANT to be emailed every single time an international moocher is interested in their books, but simply because the only other options are ‘Worldwide’ and ‘Only to my country’. These people usually write conditions on what and where they’d send internationally on their profile, and it’s pretty clear.

Being locked up from mooching at all until email correspondence is confirmed is basically putting most international moochers at the bottom of the food chain, since they’ll never be fast enough to mooch anything that is remotely high on demand.

If there ever is a new category like ‘Send internationally on conditions’, I would jump ship right away from being an Ask-First-er to the other one.

For example, could we have the system track new members who have some minimum number of books in their inventory (again, ten might be a good minimum), and who also do not get any mooches for perhaps their first week. I’m quite sure we could get a goodly number of folks on a list who would volunteer to mooch a book from such folks, and also extend a welcome and offer assistance to such Newbies. Perhaps something like the ransom wishlist process could be implemented to choose a member from that list, and request that they help get the new member started. If they could not do it, another member from the list could be randomly chosen.

My suggestion makes assumptions about the ability to track new members and their inventories, and whether or not they get any mooches, and I really have no idea if these are reasonable assumptions. It also assumes that the numbers of such short-lived members is large enough to warrant the effort to retain them, and even whether or not such information could be available.

What say you John? If John says it’s possible, anyone else have some thoughts about this or other good uses of Web log stats?

Stuart (USA: CA)
(scamp8)

1) Could you make it so that when a person was listed as “ask first”, any international mooch pulled up a window that asked the moocher: ‘Have you emailed the person and received permission to mooch this book?’ If they click yes, the mooch can proceed; if they click no, the mooch is stopped and they are prompted to email the person. If it could be set up this way, it would prevent us making the mistake of mooching without asking. (However, if a person were not honest this would not work…) I imagine a lot of the time a mooch is made w/o asking first is just due to an oversight; it is easy to overlook that the moocher requests to be asked first. I have almost completed a mooch different times without asking first before I realized I was supposed to ask.

2) Is there a way to lock out international moochers for people who want to be asked first, similar to how we cannot mooch from someone international who will only send to their country, with a difference being that we as individuals could go onto BookMooch and unlock a particular book if someone international has requested it and we are able to send it to them?

I just had those ideas so I thought I’d share. I’d be excited if one of these ideas proves helpful.

Oh, and the Bookmooch cards that I had asked for arrived today. Thank you!

It would be really interesting to see which countries are mooching and then link that to the number of active members- see where the international moochers are

Also would be interesting to see the proportion of moochers providing international mooching to local mooching as well

Doug