FR: Promise items to people even if that item hasn't been replied to

[JohnVeness]

Hi. I thought this used to be possible, but I may be misremembering. In any case, it doesn't seem to be possible at the moment:

It would be useful if you could mark items as promised, even if no one has replied to that specific item (e.g. if they have replied to a different item and asked if they can have other items too). At the moment, you have to ask them to reply to the specific item so you can mark it as promised. Thanks.

[edwh]

I think you can do this if you go to the chat with that person and click the Promise button from there.

You can't do it if you click the Promise button from My Posts. But this is deliberate, because if we showed all the people you'd communicated with recently in the dropdown list, then it would become too hard for people to find the person they were looking for. Imagine you're freegling several popular items.

[JohnVeness]

Ah, I see it - the Promise button at the bottom of the chat. I didn't immediately consider that would allow promising other items, but I see it does so.

I understand that showing all people you've recently conversed with may be a long list (although, I don't think it would be too bad). To be honest though, I was considering such a promise option from the post to just be able to say "it's promised" even if you didn't specify to whom you had promised it. That is, to try to discourage more people contacting you for very popular items, even if you haven't actually picked a "winner" yet.

[edwh]

We're very keen to know who you promised to, for a couple of reasons:

• It allows us to nudge you towards setting a time, which makes people more reliable.
• ...and if you do, allows us to send reminders, which also makes people more reliable.
• It allows us to spot when you promise to someone who doesn't turn up, which makes it more likely that they are less reliable, and allows us to warn against such freeglers.

So I want to keep that as the mainline case, and therefore I'm not keen to introduce another option where you don't specify the person.

[JohnVeness]

You're right, that makes perfect sense. Yes, items should be promised to someone in particular.

I realise you don't have infinite dev time, but it might be nice to investigate the "show a list of recent people you've communicated with when pressing a Promise button on a post" option, to add another route to promise an item to someone who you've chatted with but who hasn't replied to that exact item yet.

With the current "show a list of items on offer when pressing a Promise button on a chat" option, some people have 20 or more items currently being offered, and I don't think the list of recent conversations would be much longer than that.

I guess we would need to define "recent" conversations. Probably people you've chatted to in the last day or two would be enough. Maybe some analysis could be done on the number of chats people have had in the last X days (for people who currently have items on offer), to see how long the list might get, to see if it will be unwieldy.

[JohnVeness]

Actually no, scratch that. It's much safer to promise the item to someone from the chat (as I now realise you already can), to make sure you promise it to the correct person. Just in case you were chatting to several people with similar names. (EDIT: Yes, you might be freegling several items with similar item names and would need to pick the correct item, but that seems like an acceptable problem for the person offering items, whereas trying to remember names of people is harder!)

The only thing I would suggest now, then, is to make that a little more discoverable. Maybe when viewing one of your posts and clicking Promise, there could be some text alongside the drop-down list of people saying something list "To promise this item to someone else you've been chatting with recently, view the chat for that person and click the Promise button at the bottom".

[edwh]

The trouble is, people don't like reading text. Every time you have to put a piece of text like that on the site, then it's an indication of a failure. The people who most need to read and understand it won't, and it will just be screen clutter for everyone else.

We already make that mistake a lot, and I'm trying to remove that kind of stuff. I wouldn't want to add this for something which isn't a mainline case.

[JohnVeness]

Cool, understood :)