BTC2Free

[internetional]

Best of luck with the initiative!

This is the first time I hear about Freecycle to be honest. I thought it must be a US or UK-only type of service, but it isn't. There are many locations all over Europe as well. Almost nothing in Russia, though. Same thing in Africa and South America. There is no town in Croatia either. The closest ones to me are Sarajevo in Bosnia and Belgrade in Serbia.

I'd never heard of Freecycle either. Apparently, if your city isn't listed, you can create a group yourself to get it added. I thought I'd give it a try for my little town. But there's a catch: their website has this requirement:

The language of your area must be supported by our site. Freecycle.org is available in these languages: English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Hungarian, Japanese, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish and Turkish.

My town is right on the border with Turkey, but people in the town itself don't speak Turkish. Or any of the other languages on that list, for that matter.

But if someone managed to get Sarajevo and Belgrade added, I guess the rule isn't all that strict after all. So I went ahead and submitted an application. They should review it within 7-10 days. If they approve it, I'll join TheButterZone and spread the word to my friends.

Anyway, it's a great initiative!

[TheButterZone]

My town is right on the border with Turkey, but people in the town itself don't speak Turkish. Or any of the other languages on that list, for that matter.

But if someone managed to get Sarajevo and Belgrade added, I guess the rule isn't all that strict after all. So I went ahead and submitted an application. They should review it within 7-10 days.

Ok, I'll try to check https://freecycle.org/find-towns?tab=map periodically for a new town around the border!

In other news, looks like another fraud attempt stopped at the gate: https://github.com/TheButterZone/thebutterzone.github.io/issues/32

And GitHub cron still dragging ass for everyone.

[TheButterZone]

And anotha one: https://github.com/TheButterZone/thebutterzone.github.io/issues/33

Getting to the point where I'm considering putting a warning on the submission form that any non-existent Freecycle.org usernames will be automatically reported to GitHub as attempted fraud if they aren't replaced with a correct one within 15 minutes. If only GitHub Support didn't take ages to respond to reports, and even then, not always properly. And with my luck, GitHub would probably destroy my account instead, just like X & Reddit did.

All these notifications are just annoying to me, pretty sure there's no chance they can make it onto the deployed website unless the frauds crack my 2FA.

Anyone got any ideas?

[TheButterZone]

Looking like it may be time to find another site to be the Free side of BTC2Free, at least. But where? A username validator (like the one running on GitHub Actions, the BTC side) won't work on every global website exclusively for free stuff... BuyNothingProject signup failed just now, but it didn't look promising for a validator anyway.

Don't tell me I'm going to have to make another NIP/Kind #/reference implementation for Nostr AND try to migrate the few people who did properly sign up over there (or apologize the GitHub Page will be put into archival even if they don't feel like migrating away from Freecycle)... at least Nostr seems like it could be a good unified alternative of both the receive BTC side & the give stuff away for free side.

If not starting from scratch, Nostr Kind 33863 is at the core of Agora.spot (decentralized crowdfunding campaigns) but I'm not sure if BTC2Free would be "kind overloading". Nobody's complained to me about my one event yet, but I guess I need to ask for criticism in Agora's Armada Soapbox Community channel.

It seems that a banned member of the San Diego Freecycle.org town, who repeatedly violated one of the guidelines (no punctuation in title - instituted to help emails not be filtered as spam) & [rudely] lied to the moderator (first about not being able to see the instruction in the rejection notice where to read the guidelines, before claiming that they had read the guidelines but saw nothing wrong with their posts) has successfully appealed to the global admins to de-moderate San Diego.

Good luck to all the members
1) being able to actually read new post emails
&
2) having your own posts' emails be read
- because too many punctuation marks in the subject line got them filtered to spam/trash/or blocked at the recipient server-side!

Note that one mark is always there by default- the : after OFFER or WANTED. New post emails have been filtered to my spam folder with more punctuation than that, no way to whitelist.


Has only the San Diego Freecycle.org town had broken URLs for rejection notices?

<a href="https://newdev.freecycle.org/town/SanDiegoCA/notices/undefined"> [...]

That bug was reported to sitemodhelp@... in late January, responded to by Mod Help Volunteer Alison, and then reiterated that it still wasn't fixed in reply to sitemodhelp@...  

Now almost November, and it still wasn't fixed [as of multiple rejections, both real & test, on October 26].

The only viable workarounds seemed to be (at least for honest members posting in good faith) to make the hyperlink text say GOOGLE THIS: "Freecycle: San Diego-specific guidelines" & to send them as a mass notice to all members, which I received on 9/27/26, 00:52 UTC and was able to read top to bottom in the email itself, no broken URL standing in the way.

This wasn't the last straw, either. Flake after flake, won't take what's as close to free money as you can get in the form of redeemable recyclables... I just waited around until midnight (my published cutoff time) for a flake who claimed "I can grab them both now, within ten minutes probably" & never responded to my replies giving the green light to come over.