Rick, I like the direction you are going with this (not often I say that), but here was my thinking. We have not seen Dave's actual trade program so I'm not sure how it will work, but I thought I saw that it would be automated and count down the packs for us. Let's say you have ten packs of cucumber to trade. Instead of saying Rick can I have a pack of those, I would go to you list and click on them. The system would credit me with getting those seeds and reduce the number available to 9. If this is how the system will actually work then, I would think it would be relatively easy for Dave to be able to program limit using my formula. Using you suggestion of adding one pick to my available pick for everyone I fill over my limit might add unnecessary complication to the program. I do like the 50 pack limit, so in the case of my list, even though my formula would allow me to pick 61 the maximum would be set at 50. I seriously doubt I would even pick that many anyway. Just in case someone would want to pick more than the 50 pack maximum, we could work it like this. Run the swap for 2 weeks, use my formula: You can 1 pack for everyone you offer with a limit of 5 per variety you offer, with a maximum number of pick of 50, for the first week of the swap. After one week everyone would have had a fair chance to ask for what they wanted so the limits would end. Of course the limits on variety picks would remain. If you offer 10 packs of 10 varieties, I could still only request no more than 1 pack of each variety, not all 10 pack of one variety.

That's another swap paradigm!

Everyone sends spare and old seeds to one person, often with dubious or ambiguous common-name-ID and unknown purity and age. Purely volunteer.

The central person then sends out 10-20 pkts to new members willing to pay postage for old seeds and only limited ability to select what they get. I gave up on that when I saw the common names only narrowed them down to multiple genera and dozens or hundreds of species.

And some of the re-traded pkts were clearly MANY years old, but you didn't know if it was 5, 10 or 20 years.

That was also when I learned to distrust "OP" printed on a seed pkt. It might mean "OP - a stable variety and I'm hinting that I MIGHT have thought about isolating it at least a little", or it might mean "the wind and the bees pollinate my garden and I want to hint that maybe I don't isolate varieties with space or time of flowering".

The dual usage causes it to mean nothing unless the trader spells out with words which was meant.

http://garden.org/ideas/view/R...

Jay, you brought in a crucial concept: spacing out everyone's requests over time.

That is key, so that everyone gets some chances to request the popular things, not just those who can poise over their keyboards during the opening minutes or hours.

That can be done many ways, like "five Oinks per day max" or "no more than N oinks per day from each trader".

After a few years I noticed that some savvy traders deliberately held back some seeds until after the initial rush was over. They would add seeds during the whole duration of the swap, so that (bad thing) you had to keep re-checking their lists, and (good thing) there was often something fresh to look for or search for even if you missed the first frantic day of trading.

Almost any scheme that stretches it out, could help.

Hmm ... would there be value in showing a public list of seed types that had run out? If I knew that every one of 20 offered packages of radishes had been snapped up, I would think "RADISHES?? Who wants RADISHES?!?" and then offer all those pkts that have been sitting in my stash since the last time I went crazy with a seed catalog.

RickCorey said: I would think "RADISHES?? Who wants RADISHES?!?" and then offer all those pkts that have been sitting in my stash since the last time I went crazy with a seed catalog.

Me! Well, my husband, actually, but I plant them.

As soon as I have more of some seed type than I want, I assume it is a glut in everyone's stash. And RisingCreek gave me a lifetime supply of radish seed after hitting some eBay site or year-end sale.

Once I get a few more NEW seeds split and labelled and made visible, I'll go dig out some radish seeds. If I was willing to just say "assorted small roundish radishes" I could probably list many pkts. But counting each type, recording on paper, then entering each name separately - the part Dave coded is easy to use, but digging and counting pkts takes time.

I used to have huge amounts of saved Daikon radish seed when one crop went to seed. But I think I gave most of that away.

RickCorey said:Jay, you brought in a crucial concept: spacing out everyone's requests over time.

That is key, so that everyone gets some chances to request the popular things, not just those who can poise over their keyboards during the opening minutes or hours.
That can be done many ways, like "five Oinks per day max" or "no more than N oinks per day from each trader".

I also like the idea of limiting the number of request per day. If we used our combined ideas that would allow me a maximum of 50 request and I were allowed to place all 50 in one day, that could shut out a lot of people. Limiting per day would also make you focus on what is most important rather than just going through and scooping up even thing looks interesting or is in limited supply.

>> Limiting per day would also make you focus on what is most important



I'm eager to see what Dave comes up with for expressing the urgency of our requests.