gotta love freecycle

Titter ye not, just a few days ago we had someone offer a conservatory, I have no idea if it's gone or not but the North Dorset freecycle group had one going to anyone who could take it away without damaging the house. It was a fairly modern-ish one that fitted to the side of the house so probably pretty easy to remove.

We've had a fair amount of odd stuff, cars, silk worms, err, lots of other stuff too (can't recall now, too tired).

Based on this thread, I've joined a local Freecycle group to have a look. I have a huge shed, garage, loft, old car etc. etc. all full of junk, so it might be a good place to be.

But the use of Yahoo groups seems a bit odd. I'm on a couple of other Yahoo groups, and they are a complete pain as my main isp's at-isp-end spam filter bounces spam, which causes Yahoo to suspend the account. This means I have to unsuspend every few days. In every case I've checked, it was spam on the group that had caused the bounce. I've switched some accounts to a gmail address, but don't really want to have to check this on a regular basis. Also, the Freecycle posts don't seem to easily thread into Offered + collected. Is this possible? I'd have thought without it one might get lots of out of date contacts.

Bill (busy mending the trailer so I can get to the tip again)

You can opt to not receive emails, instead logging in to read messages on the site itself, as for the spam issue, contact your ISP about that, see if they can get their act together!

Can you set up a gmail account, use the spam checking on gmail if it exists, and get gmail to forward what's left to your main account? I've never used gmail so don't know if it's possible.

On my local group, people put "Offered" and "wanted" into the titles, also anything more than a week old is almost certain to have gone, normally when I email someone about something even if the email has only just appeared in my inbox, I'm already 4th in the queue!

I got a severe reprimand for daring to lend an inflatable mattress to a lady who asked to borrow one. Apparently lending is absolutely forbidden.

Steve

You can usually set Gmail to download to your usual mail tool.

I severely reprimanded the administrators for stating that unless people adhered to their exact guidelines for what had to go into the subject line, their posts would be deleted. I asked them whether the main point of the group was to prevent new goods being made, or to force responsible adults to obey the administrator's rules... Not only did I not get thrown off, they never carried out their post deletion threat either! It's an email group after all with replies to offers going direct to the person doing the offering, so questions about more detailed location and condition don't bother anyone else so getting too dictatorial over it seemed silly. Guidelines are fine, but some of the people I met when freecycling shouldn't be told what to do by anyone, let alone some shouty housewife on a mission.

Wonder if its the same shouty housewife as we had !

Steve

In message , William Black writes

Thanks for this and the other suggestions. I am actually using Gmail for the Freecycle account and directing it to Thunderbird. I find Thunderbird better than the MS offerings but not a patch on my normal software, Turnpike.

The thing is that I have a whole bunch of technical newsgroups and email lists coming in via Demon, my main ISP, and dropping in as newsgroups to Turnpike. I really want to keep these separate from the light stuff on Gmail on the Vista :-( machine. Demon spam filtering seems fine, and I don't want to either switch it off or try to get through their shields and ask for it to be altered. Really, It's still Yahoo Groups that are wrong for allowing spam through their forums and then switching off users who bounce it.

Anyway, Freecycle looks a good concept. They aren't all treehuggers, then?

I think many of them are car booters or freeloaders, still, it achieves the aim, stop people from needing to buy new stuff and shows some awareness at least amongst those who started the project that manufacturing is an extremely significant part of the environmental damage caused by any given thing.

That's what I use, but I use the 'Portable Apps' version so I can use it anywhere on any computer (well, any Windoze computer)

Haven't met a 'tree hugger' yet on it.

Maybe it's North Yorkshire...

freecycle admins and politicians - anyone who actually wants the job should be automatically disqualified.

and e-blayers too - they came in for a whole heap of s**te when one was found out - shock, horror, gasp!

indeed, that and keeping stuff out of land-fill - and when I pointed these things out in support of the blaggers & laggers .. or more accurately when other voices joined in ... the gestapo stepped in to remind everyone that there are other fora for discussing the plumbing. Quite right too but one wonders why the shock-horror merchants weren't silenced imediately.

Had a beauty of a complaint on a local group recently - chap posts a 'wanted' once every few weeks loking for old PCs, washers, cookers and any other scrap metal for recycling. He's obviously the scrap man. Some silly old biddy (by nature) took umbridge. Couldn't resist the temptation to dispose of our next scrap load via f/c - was gone in record quick time too.

gotta love freecycle :)

not yet seen a whole Land Rover offered although there was a 'wanted' a few months back - wonder if she got one.

Think one got offered on my group before I quit. Are there any other similar, but less anal groups ? Steve

I think a lot of it is about location and the people who run it.

We don't have any problems here, but I understand that the big city syndicates can have problems with 'over active' admins.