This suggestion from Martie Kingsley of Hindhead, UK…

Hi There
What a wonderful idea to recycle perfectly good stuff.  Could I suggest you add a “Wanted” Section?
Regards
Martie Kingsley
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Hi Martie

Thats an excellent idea! Many thanks.  Just thinking aloud here how we can tie that in… here are some initial thoughts, maybe you might like to comment…

Any member today can set two types of alerts
– a keyword alert, eg “baby” will send you an email any time anything with the keyword “baby” is in the title, subtitle, or description. (useful is you are after stuff like “tools”, “bike”, “baby” etc)
– a town alert, anytime anything is listed in your town you get an email (this one is default ‘on’ when you join, but can be turned on and off at will). Useful for opportunists that just want to see whats on offer in their town, with the option to respond if they see something that would be useful.

Now, my immediate thought on your suggestion is that we could use the keyword alert to populate a “wanted list”, and maybe have that as an extra ‘unit’ on the home page (to accompany the existing units ‘latest members’, ‘latest items’, ‘ending soon’, etc).

In that was we can avoid introducing new functionality (i like to keep things simple) and make more use of something already in the system – sort of making the ‘alerts’ public.  I guess we’d have to think about keeping members private info private, but I can see how we can do that.  I’m imagining this new panel/unit that simply says something like ‘Latest wanted’ and in it we list the most recently set keyword alerts, along with a link ‘more…’ (like on the current units) to go to a page where you can browse more.  We could even add a count (the number) of members that have set an alert for that keyword, and rank the ‘Latest wanted’ in order of most popular.

Just thinking it through, and your feedback is most welcome.

I can tell you that we already have the plans for the next phase of development, the focus of which is to firstly make it easier for members to invite their friends and neighbours, and secondly tidy up some of the existing pages and features to really make it a pleasure to use. At least in the next phase we’re keen not to add additional features, keeping it simple at first in the interests of getting what is there really great to use, but I can tell you I have added your suggestion to my list of future features, so you can be sure that your time taken to write is indeed appreciated and valuable.

I really must say THANKS for taking the time to take a look at the site AND for taking the time to write to me, it is greatly appreciated, and I hope to hear back from you with your thoughts on my ramblings above.

All the best
Ben (Big Bear)
🙂