I like all these points. I wonder if people would also be interested in a ‘find my friends’ kind of feature, where you can enable (some or all) people on your contacts list to see what town you’re in
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There is a bookmark function, but stupid enough only in the app. It’s sometimes strange how they don’t have multi cross platform support for all functions or integrated them badly. For example, for searching for a member in the app you have to go the account and then click search member instead of using the search bar as on the website.
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So Friends is implemented in the alpha app. One thing I really like is how messaging is connected to friends. You can’t just directly message any user (outside of hosting requests, or meetups later on I assume) but you have to pick from your friends list. Or send a friend request first. I think this could help a lot against spamming messages.
I still don’t think friends is a good term here. Why not name the entire section Connections or something along these lines? This has a prime spot in the main menu right now, but I can’t see much developing around a friends section, apart from having this list of contacts.
On the other hand, we already have a lot of discussion around different ways of connecting with other members. I’d hope that a more dedicated term would also encourage more dedicated thoughts down the line on how we can develop and grow this to be more than a list, but rather a fully developed section of the platform.
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I’m into this name for it, too. I love the “connecting” aspect of things and I like the idea of emphasizing it here.
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I think “connections” is a much better term!
The one other thing I used the “friends” feature of CS for is whenever I created an event, I could select all of the people I knew who I though might be interested in the event (and exclude those who wouldn’t be interested or able to attend) when I sent out invites to the event.
I liked the friend of a friend feature because it helped me connect with other people I might not have connected with. For example, the former CS Community Manager, Martina, was friends with a friend of mine from Switzerland (turns out they are even best friends!) and because of that we started messaging each other and she ended up coming to the Madison Couch Crash. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have happened if there hadn’t been that initial connection due to a mutual friend.
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Personally, I never really felt any use of it.
• Sometimes it was confusing for me to see hundreds of “friends” on some people’s profiles who never host or travel.
• it was also annoying sometimes, cuz some people were sending me a friend request out of the blue. People I never met or talk to.
• And with travelers or hosts who I felt a good friendly like connection - I kept in touch anyway, by exchanging WhatsApp or other messengers. And we met again, become a good friends or message each other time to time outside of CS app.
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I completely agree! Super annoying and inappropriate to receive a friend request from someone you never met or know.
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Speaking of receiving friend requests from someone you never met…
Am I right that there is currently no way to remove someone from your Friends/My Connections list once you accept a friend request?
I accepted a random friend request just to see how the function works, and I don’t see a remove option anywhere. I would think folks would find this useful in cases of misclicks or mistaken identity.
Apologies if this is already being addressed. (Is there anywhere else beside forum posts like this to see info on upcoming changes/known issues like that?)
Update: Devs confirmed they are indeed working on this feature.
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We have brief updates from the dev team on the Couchers.org blog.
To see issues and upcoming changes in detail, you can take a look at Issues and Pull requests on the couchers repository.
Should we make that information more accessible?
Thanks for the GitHub links. I was not aware of these, and they are precisely what I was looking for. I have seen the blog updates via the main couchers.org page, but I missed the GitHub stuff entirely. I can now see that there is an icon link on the main page literally right next to the login button. I don’t have much experience with GitHub, so I simply didn’t recognize the icon.
Anyway, sorry to sidetrack this thread. How best to view/collect/consolidate bugs and feature requests from casual users probably deserves its own thread.
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Thanks for pointing that out! I’ll make sure to add the github link to the dev updates on the blog from now on.
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I was thinking the same thing. Can we come up with an ethical way to have a private address book and a publicly acessible (by search and filter) “friends of friends”?
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I love the friends feature for just that, FRIENDS. But let us be able to save other people’s profiles too, without having to add random strangers as friends if we just want to find our way easily back to somebody.
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Actually, I’ve never had spamming messages in CS, but I’ve had a lot of spamming friend requests - people I’ve never met, almost exclusively men and from countries notorious for unwanted male attention. So I don’t really see any need neither for the Friends list nor for preventing users from send me messages if not in it. I actually wouldn’t like the latter at all. Maybe it could be optional - you can choose who can send messages to you
The spamming friend requests became a problem after they took away the information that it was supposed to be only for people you had met in real life. I think you should be able to report “spamming” profiles like that. I loved being able to 1. visit friends of friends to know who I can trust enough to go see (since I trust my friends judgements) 2. Have friends easily accessible.
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If someone adds you as a friend and you don’t know them, please report the person and include the note “this person added me as a friend but I don’t know who they are”. This will help us to identify people who are abusing the friend feature.
At the same time, messaging needs to be fixed so you can message anyone (some people might be adding people as a friend just so they can message them). Also, I think we need to remind people that they should only be adding people as friends if they are actually friends with them. Right now there is no notification or guidelines that say that.
Do you think it would be helpful to have people confirm they actually know the person before adding them? So when you click to add someone as a friend, then it would say something like:
You should only add someone as a friend if you are actually friends with them.
Are you really friends with this person?
Yes / No
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I don’t have that much of a problem with it, and I feel too many reminders about the site rules aren’t very good. This one is no big deal after all, you just don’t add the people you don’t want to add. I was just explaining why I don’t want messages to work the way they work now.
Also, I sent a friend request to a girl in a nearby city yesterday because I loved her profile. Don’t ban me, please😂 I don’t think it should be that strict, especially now, while it’s still not too many people, and it feels like a big family (and we still can’t send messages directly, and don’t have a “favourite” feature)
And should you really be able to report a person just for sending a friend request? They haven’t done anything wrong per se
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I think it’s only justified to ban someone for a friend request if we can produce evidence that they are doing it frequently or seem to be doing it haphazardly or something like that.
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Well, yeah, if there is such evidence, I agree
“Is this a person you know and are friends with?” Yes/No might work better. I would love people having to agree that they actually know someone, or even better know them “IRL” (In real life) before adding them as friends.
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