ajayr

Thanks for your comment ScottWhigham. If you've sold stuff on Craigslist/eBay, you would definitely know the value of such a service. The number of robo calls you get when you post your real phone number in ads is annoying. It doesn't end there - even weeks/months after your ad has expired and disappeared from Craigslist, you continue to receive marketing calls you didn't ask for and aren't interested in.

There is a reason why most people opt to use the anonymous email address that Craigslist provides while posting ads. We're only making it possible for people to have a similar experience with their phone numbers.

We will soon add a mandatory step to authenticate the phone number used to sign up for Roller (just like Craigslist/eBay does). It is our #1 priority to prevent spam/fraud. Thanks for the comment.

not yet, but we're adding that soon. You can decide if you want to enable receiving SMS messages upon signup.

Online booking engines can be easily customized to handle over-booking. The issue I'm looking at is that online booking engines don't have accurate (and real-time) supply picture today. If this was available, it would become possible to make reservations without the need to get confirmations from the provider.

Take sites like froomz.com or venuecricket.com, for instance. They are online marketplaces for renting spaces. They have many small-time providers renting out there dance studios or workshops. If such providers exclusively use the booking engines provided by the froomz/venuecricket, there are no issues. But if they also use Outlook to handle offline reservations, then keeping it in sync with online booking engines becomes a big challenge. You might end up booking venues only to receive a failed reservation several hours later resulting in extremely unhappy customers who will likely write bad reviews about the site and the venue.

Install NoScript and browse along. You can also just disable styling.

P.S. I oppose SOPA/PIPA and support the efforts of the Wikimedia foundation. But going without Wikipedia is hard.