Show HN: Our new ridesharing site, BurningManRides.com. Feedback?

Hey HN, I'm a long-time reader and this is my first Show HN (exciting!) It's a collaboration between me, jasonshen (of rejection therapy / cold showers / winning isn't normal), and randy.

We'd love feedback. Do you belong to any of these categories?

1) Going to Burning Man? (it's a weeklong festival in the Nevada desert, 50K attendees)-- how can we make this better for you?

2) Potential user of a more general ridesharing site? (we're talking long occasional drives, not daily commutes/carpooling)-- how can we improve on this so you'd use it?

3) Have opinions on ridesharing? -- tell us.

If you note which group(s) above you belong to in your comment that'd be great :)

Thanks so much for the help!

I'm in group 2. I usually use Craigslist. Here are my main gripes:

-No standardization of locations, so no way for the system to show you who's going where at what time automatically.

-People shouting past each other a lot, like somebody offered a ride to a place three days ago and then a ton of people pile on the day of the ride looking to go to that place

-Reputation scoring, i.e. how often do they flake, etc.

I would use the shit out of a general-purpose rideshare site if you build it. Also, I am a front-end engineer mainly interested in helping people share stuff. So there's that.

Good work!

what's to prevent users from getting stabbed

I definitely like grouping rides by the date that the driver is starting his/her trip - maybe make that a tad more obvious? A small aside like a jQuery calendar or simple title like "Find a Ride by Date..." would get that message across.

Random idea: Instead of some calendar or other search/organization method, you might look at a map with jQuery slider. The idea would be to hook people up with drivers that might drive past their location (but not start there), and otherwise help discovery.

You might jerry-rig a single map with all "active" routes laid on it, and a jQuery slider that changes the date. It would be a cool way to see all the rides/routes available on any given day. Multiple colored routes on a single map should be possible - see here: https://groups.google.com/group/google-maps-api/browse_threa...

Stabbers have many better options for finding stabbees.