As I wrote a month ago, I've been working on a feature to help people meet in the real world and exchange books.

This "meet and mooch" feature is now available. I've decided to kick things off by organizing [forum:london_moochers] and [forum:bay_area_moochers].

Under the "About" button on your home page, there is a new "Meetings" menu.

Anyone can organize a meeting.

A specialized "forum" is created for it, which shows the information about the meeting, who is attending, and makes it easy to browse the inventories of people who will be coming to the meeting. When you click the "attend this meeting" button, a message is automatically posted saying "I will attend this meeting" with a link to your inventory and wishlist. People can also ask you questions on this meeting's forum, and you'll receive them by email.

There is a new "meeting mooch" row on book details, if the book is available for mooching from someone attending a meeting. Instead of clicking "mooch", you click the "meeting mooch" link. This tells the person to bring the book to the meeting instead of postal mailing it.

The pending page automatically notices which books are "meeting mooches" and labels them as such. There is a "books to bring" button in the "pending" section, which gives you a handy list (with covers) of the books you need to bring to a particular meeting.

There is a new announcement forum of all meetings, which is updated automatically: Meet and Mooch. Since it's a forum you can also receive those announcement by email, or subscribe to it as one of "your forums".

Meetings are automatically advertised to relevant members. The advertisement appears on your "member home page" if there's a meeting in your country or (in the USA) state. If a meeting would attract people from other countries or states (such as if the meeting is near a border), the organizer can choose to advertise to neighboring countries or US states.

If you don't want to be shown meetings on your member home page, you can hide them by clicking the new "Do not show me nearby meetings" setting in your profile.

Forums now have a new feature just for admins: "Admins only: email a copy of this message to all members". The incentive for this is for the organizer of a meeting to be able to a) remind everyone who is attending about the meeting, b) if there is a date or venue change, it's important to be able to "push out" the news to everyone, and c) I think this could be generally useful on some other forums. Obviously, I'll be watching how this particular feature is used to make sure it's appropriately used.

I'm not exactly sure how old meetings will "expire". For the time being, I'm thinking that the organizer will (at some point) delete the meeting. I don't want to automatically delete them, because there might be quite useful information in the archives that people are relying on. We'll see how this aspect of it works out. I've always been annoyed at how eBay erases old auctions after a while, but I can see how that can be necessary.

As with all new features at BookMooch, this will likely go through significant improvements over the next few weeks, in response to feedback on this forum. So, please do speak up if you like/dislike certain ways in which it works, or would like to see new things added to it.

-john

I've changed my status from worldwide to ask first which will prevent any other international requests. I also went back and reserved the heavy books to avoid domestic mooch requests but doing this nullifies the "bring to meeting" button.

I think the meet and mooch is great. wish it were in my area.

need some help. i have a book reserved for someone but when i go to send a reminder that the "reserved til" date is close i dont find any way to do that. ive check my pending page and its not listed there. i clicked on the book in my inventory and it says the name but theres no link to send a reminder nor is there any way to go to the reserved person's page. can you please help with this? i dont remember it being this difficult before all the wonderful changes youve made. and i do love all the changes. you keep making the site better and better. thank you for all your hard work. this site is the ONLY site i use. im so happy i found it.

Please tell me more about this new idea!

Thanks!

Victoria

Also, bringing desserts - can we just buy some cake/ cookies/ something simple from a shop to bring?

Of course, you don't have to make something!

Any chance that we will see Canadians listed by province at some point? The Bay Area meet and mooch is closer (and cheaper for me to get to) than the Toronto area one would be.

Yes, my plan is to add provinces for Canada and some other countries as well. I wanted to get the feature up first, and see where the meetings occur, and then focus on helping them.

Is it possible to add an option to mark some books as "Meet & Mooch" delivery only.

There isn't a built in way at the moment, but as a workaround, how about putting a note to that effect in the condition notes for those heavy books?

need some help.

Do send an email to tech support at
http://bookmooch.com/m/email_support

your question is just the sort of thing they can help with.

-john

just a suggestion for future improvements: it would be really great if when i go to mooch a book ive already mooched before a message pops up reminding me ive already mooched it and asking me to confirm i truly wish to mooch another copy. ive inadvertently double mooched books over the years which is a pain as i normally only read a book once unless its really exceptional. it would be great if there was a setting to turn that notice off tho for those who dont care or dont want that type of "warning". this would be especially helpful for those who have mooched thousands of books over their years with BM. its really difficult to remember the title of every book ive ever read never mind everyone ive ever mooched.

thanks so much for your continued hard work in improving an already awesome site.

Thanks for the good job you do.

Britta

Sorry, but I don't see the new "Meetings" menu under the "About" button.
Is it really there? I did finally find some meetings sort of discussions in the Forums section.

But I can't find the "Meetings" menu. I also tried "Site Map" to find it. No luck there either.