07 · The app
The offer is the whole message
You put things on each side, send it, and the other person answers once for the whole arrangement. No haggling thread, no opening pleasantries, no phone numbers.
01
You make an offer
One of your things for one of theirs, or several for several — up to twelve items on the asking side. Both bands are shown, so you can both see the shape of it before anybody agrees.
02
They accept, decline, or say what was wrong
A decline can carry a short reason chosen from a list, so you know whether you were close. If it was not right, send a different offer rather than asking about it.
03
Chat opens on acceptance, and not before
This costs something and it is worth naming what. An open message box on an offer nobody agreed to is the cheapest way to reach a stranger who never asked to be reached.
The first thing it usually carries is a phone number — after which the swap happens somewhere else, nobody confirms a handover, and there is nothing for anyone to read if it goes wrong.
04
You meet, and you both confirm
Both of you say the handover happened, and only then does it count as done. Neither person can claim a completed swap alone.
Where to meet is suggested rather than left to the two of you to invent — see meeting places.
Either of you can call it off.
Right up until somebody confirms the handover. The items go straight back to the people who put them up, and back onto the site exactly as they were.
That exists because agreeing moves both items into each other’s vaults immediately. Without a way back, a swap that fell through would leave you both holding a record of something neither of you received.
If they never turned up, this is the same button. You are not stuck with a swap that did not happen.
Keeping an eye on something
Every item somebody else holds carries “Keep an eye on this” beside the swap button. It saves the item to a list at the bottom of your vault and does nothing else — it reserves nothing, joins no queue, and tells the owner nothing about you.
What the owner sees is a number: “3 people are keeping an eye on this”. Never who, and never when.
It exists so that an item nobody has offered for yet does not look identical to an item nobody wants, which is the difference between leaving something up and taking it down.
Once somebody has confirmed
The cancel button goes. At that point a person is saying the exchange physically happened, and unpicking that is a disagreement between two people rather than something a button should settle.
Report the swap and an administrator can read the whole conversation. What you received lands in your vault, off the site until you list it again.
