Managing participants and running the draw

If you created the exchange, you are its organizer. This guide gathers everything you can do from that position, and also what you cannot, which is usually the part worth knowing in time.

The organizer's three buttons

Opening your exchange you will see three buttons the other participants do not have:

• Invite — shows the link to share.
• Draw — opens the draw screen, which is also where exclusions live.
• Manage — edits the exchange details.

Invite and Draw disappear once the draw is done. Manage stays for good.

Inviting people

The Invite button brings the join link back whenever you want it. You can copy it, use your device's share menu, or send it straight to WhatsApp.

It is the same link for the whole group, and it is public on purpose: anyone who has it can sign up while the exchange stays open. Every time somebody joins, you get a notification.

The participants tab

Everybody can see who is in the exchange. What changes as organizer is that you also see the email addresses and get actions on each person.

Resend the invitation

If somebody says nothing arrived, you can resend their email from their row. It is the first thing to try before writing anyone off.

Fix an email address

If you typed an address wrongly, you can edit it.

With one important exception: if that address has already been verified by its owner, it is locked and you cannot repoint it elsewhere. The screen tells you so. This is deliberate: a verified address is a person's identity, and nobody else should be able to change it.

Remove somebody

You can, but only when all three conditions hold at once:

• You are the organizer.
• The exchange was created with a shared link.
• The draw has not run yet.

In a manual exchange nobody can be removed, because it is drawn at the moment of creation. And the organizer can never be removed.

The draw

When the group is complete, press Draw.

The window shows how many people are confirmed, the exclusions block, and the Perform draw now button.

What you need

At least three participants. With fewer, the button is disabled and the screen tells you how many you have.

What the draw does

It deals a single circle: everyone gives once and receives once, nobody draws themselves, and no two people are ever paired with each other. If you set exclusions, it honours them in both directions.

If the exclusions make any valid deal impossible, the draw is refused and says so. No exclusion is ever silently skipped.

What happens immediately after

• The exchange is marked as drawn.
• The link stops accepting new people.
• An email goes out to each participant with their assignment.
• If any email failed, you are told how many out of the total.

That last notice matters: the draw is done whatever happens to the mail, and you are the only person who can reach the ones who did not get it through another channel.

It cannot be repeated

A drawn exchange refuses any attempt to draw again. Think twice before pressing the button, especially if you are still expecting somebody.

Seeing who gives to whom

As organizer you can look at the full map of assignments. It is administrator information because it is, literally, the whole group's secret at once.

It is there for what it is genuinely useful for: chasing whoever has not bought yet, without asking in the group chat and ruining the surprise.

An exchange that has not been drawn returns an empty list. That is a state, not an error.

Editing the exchange

Manage lets you change the details after creation: name, date, location, budget, currency, message, category and group.

Cancelling an exchange is done by deactivating it from that same screen.

Common errors and what to do

• "At least 3 participants are needed." People are missing. Share the link again.
• "With the current ones no draw is possible." Remove an exclusion or invite more people.
• Somebody did not get the email. Resend the invitation from their row. If their address was mistyped and is not yet verified, correct it and resend.
• Somebody arrived late and the link no longer works. The draw has run and there is no going back. That one has to be sorted out outside the app.

Worth knowing

• Participants' email addresses are not shown to other participants; the server strips them before they reach the screen.
• The budget is a suggestion visible to everyone, not a limit the system enforces.
• The country carried by the exchange address decides which store everybody searches products in.