OFFER: advice

1) When responding to an offer on freecycle DO NOT use all one case (either UPPER or lower) and DO use punctuation. Your response will most likely be
ignored if you cannot write a readable and courteous email.

2) Because offers on freecycle generate approximately 100 million responses from people asking for the offered item, DO NOT send follow-up emails. If you don't hear
from the offerer, assume you have not won the lottery and won't get the item.

3) DO NOT send emails to the offerer asking for special conditions or
more details and DO NOT ask to be telephoned about the item.

4) Most of all, DO NOT send emails asking if the offerer received your email. He/she did. Your response was NOT chosen from the 100 million responses and someone else's was. DO NOT stress about this; it is the way the freecycle game is played.

The preceding is a rant and rules that were almost posted on freecycle and, because it sounded too much like a similar rant on another yahoo group, was nixed by others in my household with more sense.

Freecycle is a perfect example of community. It's a non-self selecting group; people of all types are participating. There are lots of folks you have to get along with or at least treat with what passes for respect, when in fact you are bothered all to hell by them. You can get lots of great stuff from freecycle but if you offer stuff you've got to be prepared to face a barrage of emails, many from people who do not get the concept very well.