Just one quick question: How is it any different than placing an ad in the local paper? People have been doing that for centuries. It’s not. There’s parinoia, justifyable parinoia and then there’s living-in-fear-of-everybody. Why do you think someone wanting the TV on freecycle would be any different from a newspaper ad just because it’s online?
Our Japanese Freecycle works very well despite huge distances between most of the members, thanks to a nifty cash-on-delivery system that the Post Office and lots of courier offices have. So all our ads go out, “Free, Chakubarai”. Someone asks for the stuff, sender packs it up (only works for stuff up to about 1.5m long and less than 35kg) and takes it to courier or Post Office. You don’t pay anything to send it, and it is delivered to the recipient’s door, where they pay the shipping. Post Office is OK for small stuff, but courier service is CHEAP here - you can send anything from almost any convenience store and a cardboard box you can lift comfortably in your arms might cost 20 dollars. My kids and I are in the sticks, so miss English bookshops. A box of about 20 books will cost as much as buying two new ones, even if we COULD get to a shop. Even if there are some no-good ones in the bunch, more than a couple of good ones, and we’ve “won.”
It depends on your mods. The Houston Freecycle has multiple moderators and they routinely punt people from the list for violating rules – posting excessive want ads and never any offers, anything that remotely resembles spamming, offers of live animals, etc. They also post rules reminders about once a month and do polls for changes to the rules when something warrants it.
jinwicked I wanna join your list. My local one sucks, sucks, sucks and the mod seems disinclined to do anything about it. It was so frustrating to see a good thing go bad when it would have been easy to mod it so that it didn’t.
My moderator is a lawyer and very rarely ever gets online. Why he wanted to be a mod or why he was chosen, I’ll never know.
Everything was OK until the local news did a story about Freecycle and the drooling masses came swarming with their cries of WANTED! WANTED! WANTED!!!
Good point. 
My local Freecycle list doesn’t allow postings of animals, and so far the wanted posts haven’t gotten out of hand. What irks me is the people who get snippy when people respond to an offer after it’s taken – Yahoo delivers mail out of order constantly, and I know I’ve posted a taken on an item only to not have it show up for 24 hours, and meantime I’m getting flooded with people wanting my item. But so far I’ve had no problems with either pickups or delivery; apparently our local freecyclers are responsible citizens. The only time there was a problem was when there was a mixup over when a guy was coming to pick up some Mardi Gras beads from me, and when he arrived before I’d had a chance to go get the beads out of storage, I ended up giving him more than originally planned by way of apology. Hey, I’ll get some of them back in a couple weeks anyway. 
But I think the difference is in the size of the local area and the attentiveness of the mods. It’s not that big a list here, and so things are still pretty manageable, plus we have several very good mods who pay close attention to the list. I’m not sure I’ll Freecycle forever, but since I’m going to be doing a major house-clearing-out shortly in preparation for moving, it’s a good way to get rid of stuff with minimal effort. Plus around here, a lot of small charities ask for stuff via Freecycle, and so it’s a good way of sending stuff to where I know it will be used.
I just went to the Freecycle main page, hoping to find a cite for the banning of animal exchanges so I could bitch to my local mods. Unfortunately, the FAQ says that it’s up to the mod of each group to decide whether to allow this or not. It seems my local group allows it. 
Addendum to my “puppy” post: The same woman has just posted two more “desperately wanted” posts for tons of furniture for her apartment – including an entertainment center with room for a 27" TV. I own a house and I don’t even have an “entertainment center” (because gasp I can’t afford new furniture right away while making house payments) and I haven’t died yet. If you don’t hear from me for a few days, though, send a search party.
I agree 100%. I <3 good mods.