Good until recently I have had good experiences in the past. But recently I was ignored when I tried several times to contact my local moderators after a scary experience. I was giving away some paving materials. Many people replied, but I offered it to the first person, as I felt I should. He texted and showed up promptly. But he also tried to completely control the pickup, and made me extremely uncomfortable. He was verbally abusive and very creepy. He told me that he was friends with the moderators, and basically knew more than I did. And I got no reply to any of my complaints to the moderators. No response at all. I am much more wary now, and hesitate to use freecycle. I recommend that you do not have someone pick up from your home if at all possible. Vet the person if you can, and have someone with you at any pickup. My experience was traumatic.

I used to be part of freecycle.org… I used to be part of freecycle.org for the St Catharines, Ontario (Canada) group. My account got deleted without being notified ahead of time or even told why. A few years later (this week) I rejoined to try and give away a desk and drawers that I had got from someone locally. I then tried posting an ad for the free desk and had copied over my ad from another free ad site. My post about the free desk was not approved TWICE without any admin stating why. Then on the third time, it got deleted again and an admin wrote why it had not been approved, something about not having a phone number in the ad or even referring to one(!!). Since I had copied my ad from another site, I had forgotten to take out the reference to calling which is why it was deleted. It took 3 days for me to be told why. Not very good. I have deleted my account with freecycle as it is not what it used to be.

Weird feeling I made a post asking for any digital camera and this person told me they had one and we could meet. I said sure but somewhere where there’s people and then sent me their number. I checked her picture on whatsapp (around 60 years old woman) and decide to check if it’s AI generated or not, and it was 99.9% generated. The way she was talking and how she looked didn’t match either. The person was also being quite insistent on meeting… why are you insisting if you’re giving it away? I’m not meeting up with this person but be careful with this!!

Throw stuff out. Don't waste your time here. Full of people that engage you in endless chat and then disappear. I haven't cleared anything on this site for over a year despite offering good quality items for recycling. I would have been messed around by at least 10 people in that time saying they will turn up and never do. Came home early for someone to collect an armchair. Never turned up. Never responded. Absolute total waste of time. Just throw stuff out. Far easier.

A suggestion..... I’ve used this site a lot and it’s been really helpful, BUT I think the process could be made a lot easier for both sides if people had to formally commit to collection. Sometimes people say they want an item then don’t turn up, and you might have stayed in or turned down someone who really wanted it/ would have collected it. Could an option be added to the website where an offer is made/ accepted with a specific time window (and maybe one chance to re-schedule) and if they were a no-show it would be recorded on their profile? It would be an incentive not to be flakey, and if you had 2 offers and could see that one person had collected 100% of their items and another 50%, you could make an informed choice about who to offer it to. Also it would help those collecting things because you could see it had already been promised to someone (you could offer people the option to go on a waiting list in case it became available again).