No matter how many blocks or stops you put up, someone will always find a way around to create fake references and lie on their profile.
A good strong community is the only way to oust this type of person.
I personally would love to have my CS references imported/link to see references attached to my Couchers profile. The greatest currency on here is the references and for some people it took years to build that up.
The CS reference system was a good system, if it wasn’t the site wouldn’t have worked as well as it did.
No system is perfect, it’s about picking one that has the least amount of problems and relying on the community to toss out the crappy people.
GDPR gives you the right to request a copy of your data. Still just as useless as PDF’s, as there’s no guarantee that it’s the original. Sad, but suck it and see, start building new references again, and never use commercial/closed platforms again!
If adding pictures would become possible then of course one could also add pictures of the references. It would be then for the other to decide if they are trustworthy or not, or ignore them always.
With a bit of gut-feeling I think it is quite do-able to judge on the validity of the references. On the other hand it’s tiring to always be aware of possible fraud and it’s chill to be able to trust on secure information.
You say you would like to be able to import Couchsurfing references, but are you able to export Couchers references? Because, if we are going to blame Couchsurfing for not providing a good way to do this, it would be very hypocritical if Couchers can’t do this either.
That would be the most obvious thing to do. You should be able to export it in some plain text format that’s digitally signed. Other additional ways of validating can be added too, if needed.