Good to know. Thanks, everyone! I did miss that discussion somehow. I will change my send date accordingly, then. I wonder if it should read "must be postmarked by"? Perhaps that's six one half dozen of the other.

Personally, I am concerned about someone sending their mail via methods that take 8-10 business days, so I may have to stipulate that only certain mailing methods will be allowed. (I, personally, liked the arrive-to date because it gives the host a definitive day they can prepare the boxes and the members do have a certain amount of personal liability to get their seeds to the host using a reliable and quick means of shipping. If they wait until the last minute, it's on them to use something like overnight shipping to get it to arrive on time. With ship-by days, it makes things much less predictable. I'm concerned I may not get seeds back out to everyone by the deadline if some people use slower methods.)

There is no way to guarantee the arrival date. Even if the participant sends the day after the swap ends, it still may not reach you by the arrival date, since the sender has no control on what happens after the the post office has it. Having a sent by date at least guarantees to have them all in the mail by a certain time. You could require that everyone use Priority Main to send to you. I did not require it on mine but listed it as the prefered method.

DogsNDaylilies said:I, personally, liked the arrive-to date because it gives the host a definitive day they can prepare the boxes and the members do have a certain amount of personal liability to get their seeds to the host using a reliable and quick means of shipping. If they wait until the last minute, it's on them to use something like overnight shipping to get it to arrive on time. With ship-by days, it makes things much less predictable. I'm concerned I may not get seeds back out to everyone by the deadline if some people use slower methods.

Either way it's done, you aren't going to be absolutely certain that things will arrive when they should. Even more so if a holiday falls around the same time. Regardless of the shipping method you specify, I'd be inclined to allow at least one, if not two, weeks from the "must be shipped by" date; and even then there may be some that come in later.

Last spring I received a priority mail box containing live aquarium plants that was completely smashed up, with a little sticker from the PO that said "we're sorry your package was damaged during processing"... it took 2 weeks to get to me (and no wonder!) Fortunately, the sender sent me a replacement without any hassle -- despite the fact that it wasn't his fault that this happened, any more than it was mine. And quite a few years ago I was receiving my paycheck from a company in Florida via FedEx (I have no idea why they chose to do that rather than use direct deposit); it always arrived regular as clockwork, until one time it was over a week late... turned out the envelope (one of the letter-size cardboard things) had somehow slipped through the machinery and was lying on the floor for a while . So -- you just never know.

I once sent out three priority mail boxes on the same day containing plants one arrived on time the others were ''lost in space'' the second showed up 3 months late and third... still '' lost in space'' Must have been a bad day because I have been shipping the same way for years and no real late problems.

What I meant was that if I have an 'arrive by' date, I have 'permission' to start organizing boxes that day to get them out. If its a send-by date, then it's ambiguous and users may get upset if I send out boxes before their seeds have arrived. It leaves the host open to criticism for doing it 'too early'.

Since everyone said early on that it's important to have seeds back by the end of January because that's when many southerners do their planting, I'm trying hard to ensure that happens.

[Edited to change two typos]

The system does not have a arrive by date but you can specify that in the rules of your swap. You can enter the absolute "must send by..." deadline, and then state in the rules that packages must be received by, for example, a week after the send deadline.

There's something to be said for requiring "Priority" mail. Since they all have tracking numbers, I would guess that they get lost somewhat less often, and you can tell the Post Office WHERE they lost it. Once the Piggy Swap experienced an entire Post Office BAG of holiday mail going astray for weeks, and that bag had multiple Piggy boxes.

Maybe require a "ship by" date of X for Priority mail, but require First- Class mail to be sent 7 days earlier than X, and still require a tracking number for FC mail.

"Seven days" subtracted from the time between end-of-trading and the "Priority ship by" date might not give many days for packing up and sending out! But I guess some people pack up incrementally over the last few days of the swap, and might appreciate the option of sending via FC mail to save two dollars.

Personally, I like to wait for a swap to finish trading before I start packing. Then I only have to search my stash ONCE for each variety, and can "toss" all the outgoing pkts of that variety into members' pots all at once.

(I use 5" plastic pots, one for each member, in alphabetical order by screen name, to hold the outgoing pkts. If there are more members in the swap than pots will fit into the open space on my table, I double up members with just a few requests into the same pot, and untangle those later.)

RickCorey said:
Personally, I like to wait for a swap to finish trading before I start packing. Then I only have to search my stash ONCE for each variety, and can "toss" all the outgoing pkts of that variety into members' pots all at once.

DogsNDaylilies said:...users may get upset if I send out boxes before their seeds have arrived. It leaves the host open to criticism for doing it 'too early'.

As the host of the swap you can set your own mini-set of rules within the available program that Dave has provided - you can set the date when your re-packing will begin. Anyone who mails late should know the consequences in advance as it should be part of your rules. As the host you cannot send anything out "early" as the re-packing cannot be done until all packages have arrived at your home and/or until the set date has arrived.

The Priority mail which includes tracking is the best option for most folks and as we found our during that one Piggy Swap, if the Post Office misplaces the packages they are required to hunt them down and get them to you asap. No postal system is perfect but the USPS is the best option we have.

"Anyone who mails late should know the consequences in advance "

DnD, what are your thoughts as far as a package (or packages) that missed the deadline? Return the seeds that were sent for that person to the members that sent them, and return the late package back to its sender?

Sandy, that's the quandry. My rules leave it semi-ambiguous, but I do state that late -arriving packages may result in the person not getting their seeds and that the host is not responsible for late -arriving seeds (the implication being that people won't get seeds that aren't sent in time). That said, I'm trying to make my send-by date accommodate a couple of days of 'breathing room' for any packages ruining a day or two late.

If it weren't that so many people do their planting at the end of January, I'd have no qualms about prolonging the send-in period a bit, but I have to make sure they get to me with time for organizing and sending them back out. :)

I'm going to put an 'arrive-by' date in the rules this time and I'll figure out a better solution for the next swap.

Or you could limit your swap participants to people who live in the colder climates and don't plan on starting their seeds early. That may work and will allow you more wiggle room on the dates. One plus to that is the seeds would be suitable for similar climates.

calling @Dave @Trish

can a swap host get an article/idea published (in fairly short order) that will alert the general population about the swap and what its general theme is?

What would be better would be to have me post a general announcement to the homepage.

The reason I asked about it was this thread The thread "Multi trader seed swap?" in Seeds forum

@Dave , could we have a printable version/view of our 'bought' and 'sold' seeds for each swap? I'd like it so that I can print out what I received for a swap and what I gave away. Printing the current view would span many pages (4-5, in my case) and use up a lot of colored ink.

Please please? Or a CSV file. It would also be very helpful if we could print the "Comments" in our Swap List, because very often the database name does not distinguish WHICH of several offers a given row is.

I would change many database names to hand-typed IDs that I could distinguish, but then other members couldn't click on a close variety in the database.

I think in the past I could copy-paste trade lists into something like MS Word, and it was manageable.

But the last time I tired that, it was "triple-spaced" with two blank rows inserted between each data row.

DogsNDaylilies said: could we have a printable version/view of our 'bought' and 'sold' seeds for each swap?

I have added a printer friendly version of that page. When you're looking at it you'll see the option near the top, in the right side table.

No spreadsheet/csv file for now.

Thank you, Dave! That was quick!

Thank you! The printer-friendly version is also more copy-paste friendly than the screen "My Swap List".

I think only the Swap List for an entire swap and the "Bought" screen have print-this-page buttons, not "My Swap List" or the "Sold" lists?

I haven't tried again today to copy-paste "My Swap List" , but it was very handy to go the the Swap List for an entire swap, filter to show just my items, then go to the printer-friendly version, then copy-paste that into a format I can edit.

BTW - I noticed that after copy-pasting into MS Word, the entries that were copied exactly from the database turned out to be double-spaced - there is an extra line-feed before the database link. That might be intentional or "don't care" since the User field usually takes up two lines, and the Plant field usually only one line.

The shot below is how it looks after deleting the "User" column, after pasting inot MS Word: