I spent a whole day yesterday trying to track down journals that went missing over the last year yesterday and am not a tenth of the way down the list. It is a frustrating and thankless job as most that go missing stay lost forever.
Journal creators: what you do with your own journals is, of course, up to you, but I am letting you know too as I assume you do not want your journal to be unrecoverable.
PLEASE All journallers:

1. Please do check the logo (shown on the right of this message) is in the friends' list of those you agree to send to at each request, and

2. if it is not, ask them to mail bmjl and wait for the logo to appear before agreeing to send. (This may take a while, because a simple click of a link does not show that the information has been read and will be acted on.)

3. Check the recipient is active before sending if you have delayed posting.
Recently an ex-Bookmoocher in Australia contacted me to say a journal she had requested over a year previously had arrived. Meantime she had stopped wanting it and had left Bookmooch. As there are NO active journallers I can see in the whole of Australia, and the reason the journaller had left was that she can no longer afford postage, it meant the potential loss of the journal.

4. Please do your best to make sure journals do not get mislaid. Keep them together in a box, on a shelf, and remember they are someone's creation which they hope to see completed one day!

In the past the library personnel and personal friends of mine have knocked at doors, spent a lot in postage and many, many hours trying to keep journals circulating and slideshows updated. Please lend us your support in this if you want journalling to flourish.

But back to the first, I am actually beginning to think that if someone mooches a journal, and they are not a friend of the Charity AND they haven't contacted the Charity or you (the person it is requested from) FIRSTHAND... THEN you should Reject the request with the following explaination:

"This is a BMJournal, not a regular book. If you would like to join the project contact userid bmjl at bio:bmjl and request to become a friend of the journal Charity. After this is done and you say that you understand the rules of journalling you may request this journal again."