I can see lots of people on the map but the majority seem to have signed up but have no information. So numbers are growing but not in a useful way 
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Empty profiles were a major problem for BeWelcome too ( probably still the case, I don’t know), and a hard problem to crack.
In the early days of CS, you would receive a personalized welcome message from one of the local volunteers.
The only thing I can think of is some gamification to make people fill their profile: you fill it, you get a reward (like you fill your text description, you can other people’s descriptions, you fill your pictures you can see other pictures).
forcing to fill something would only make the person filling something random at best, deliberately misleading at worst.
Thai something that worsen average quality of profiles (since an empty one is easy to recognize, a random one need more attention, a false one is more difficult)
i’m suprised none of the replies to this thread are about what i talked about, which was that in the newsletter “Couchers” claimed they had 200k members rather than 20k members
In the screenshot you posted earlier “23.000” members is mentioned three times. To me it’s obvious that it’s just a typo.
Couchers is AWESOME, just like the very old vintage CS, before the greed kicked in.
I’m couch-crashing at the Federal City Shelter in Washington, D.C., looking for a more stable place to store my stuff. Theft is a huge issue at homeless shelters.
If anyone can put me up for a number of nights until I find my own place in DC, it’ll be great!