@dave, there has been a lot of talk about making the swap fair and one to one trades etc.. In my past experience with the Piggy Swap I know that Ella set limits on request such as request per day or request from each individual. But the problem is that there was no "Trade Police" monitoring each request. With the system you have created it could be programed to limit how many request a person can make.
Here would be my suggestion. As I said in another post you should be able to request up to but no more than what you have to offer. So if you are only offering 5 packs the you should only be able to request 5 packs. If you have a 100 packs then you could request 100. The down side of this is the varieties each member offers.
Member one offers 4 packs each of 25 varieties and member two offers 100 pack of only 1 variety. Although both would be able to ask for 100 pack base on what they have to offer, number two is very unlikely to give away as many as they requested. So I would say add an additional limit of 5 request per varieties offered. So in this scenario member one would be able to request 100 packs and member two could request only 5 packs.
If a member offered 20 packs each of 5 varieties he/she would be able to request 25 packs.
5 varieties X 5 pack maximum per variety = 25 packs.
If a member offered 3 packs each of 4 varieties and 30 packs of 1 variety the he/she would be able to request 17 packs. They would get credit for all three pack on the four varieties that did not exceed the 5 pack limit and only a credit of 5 for the one that did exceed.
Looking at my own list, I am offering 109 packs of seed but using this formula I could only request 61 packs.
This would not be complicated for the traders since it would be programed into the system and limits would be controlled automatically by the system. Individual would not have to figure out there own limits or when to stop.
