Yeah I’ve been thinking about this too. Really important at the start for profiles to appear active. For a start, we’re going to send out emails to people from next week if they haven’t filled out a bit of their profile and uploaded a picture, and a reminder (if they haven’t already) will become part of the normal sign-up flow.
A lot of these suggestions are great and we’re going to try a few of these strategies.
I think for the time being it might even be a good idea to not show those profiles on the map, and then later as our search functionality improves, we can filter them out by default but people will have the option to show them. But I think in general our appraoch should be more about encouraging people to fill profiles out.
Yes, I also think encouraging is better than sanctioning. One direction I’d find helpful is also looking beyond the profile and thinking about what we consider valuable contribution to the platform in general. And how we could make these visible on the profile.
For example I think the overview section is a rather generic concept right now. We could probably design that to make it look more like a presentation card that users would like to own and look good. And with space for some more creative information? Like “My favourite place” with the option to link to a city/place entry (that users could have contributed themselves).
It may be helpful for us to build a tool that would easily lets couchers transfer data from couchsurfing to their profile. Ideally the tool would take download data from couchsurfing and automatically fill the relevant data fields. This would decrease a lot of the friction that comes with completing profiles on a new account. I’m sure many of us have profile completion fatigue . At least I do. So a tool that reduces this friction as much as possible would not only be useful but could become key in gaining more users from the couchsurfing platform. Just a thought
Spot on, Elom. I just had a friend who’s been a long-time host and couchsurfing participant tell me the exact same thing, he just wanted to copy-paste his profile and not deal with it. I know trustroots has already figured out how to do it, maybe they’ll be willing to share.
Maybe it’s a good idea to add more questions? “Who I am” and “Current mission” are kinda puzzling, and the favourite story one makes me go “how should I choose? and that’ll be a wall of text!” Not saying they shouldn’t be there, but maybe we all can brainstorm some other interesting prompts? “Fun fact about me”, “The craziest thing I’ve done”, “My favourite places” - these are just the first things that came to mind.
I do not know about others but I am starting to get irritated by the opening page.
First: it never remembers me (Macintosh OS X in Chrome).
When I log in, I get that Dashboard page. It tells me that I should upload a profile picture, but I did that. And this thing that I should fill in my “Who I am” section. I did that too but maybe there is a minimum number of words?
Do you need to enter your password every time? I do see the “log in” button every time, but if I press it, it doesn’t ask for any data, just opens the dashboard
Here on forum it shows my picture but on the main site there is not much that indicates that one is in.
Also, it was non-intuitive for me to navigate from this forum back to the main site. Now I found that I should click “app” but I would have expected that link under the couch.
(I will get a CS guest this weekend, and I would like to introduce them to this new alternative. I know it is still in beta but I would like it to have a friendlier user interface.)
It looks like it’s showing up because you haven’t sufficiently filled out your “Who I am” section. We have a minimum character count before it counts as filled, I can’t remember how much exactly but it’s small, but longer than just “cyclist”.
We’ll make it clearer why it’s showing up for people in your case.
Apart from the obvious gripes with dear old CS at the end, there’s another which messed things up all the time - the empty profile. If I invite someone into my house, I do want to know the kind of person he or she is. Blank profiles, or those that provide only meaningless padding (“I like travelling” - Oh, I thought you were doing this to punish yourself!), are no use whatever, and actively harm the whole project, which is about making contact between humans, not signing a register and handing over the keys to a free hotel room.
I suggest a policy of dipping into members’ profiles, sending a reminder if there is nothing in them, following up with a warning, then deleting the spam ones.
FierceKitty, I totally agree with you about empty profiles.
As a CS host I received countess hosting requests from empty or near-empty profiles. I simply ignored them and did not reply…but still it was a time waster. It is damaging to the reputation and functioning of the site and community if there is a significant number of both empty profiles and inactive profile.
For starters I’d want to see all profiles that don’t have a clear face photograph given a reminder and brief time to add one or be deleted. No exceptions! Likewise with profiles that have no info uploaded.
Other info that creates a fuller picture of the person is also essential to me.
I noted in another thread there was a proposal back in May to send out an email to owners of empty profiles requesting they fill in their profiles. Did that happen? Did people respond and fill out their profile? Was there/will there be follow-up action to those profiles still empty?
Out of interest I did a map search for my own country. Only 16 people listed - of those only 4 with photo and info. The remaining 12 profiles had neither a photo nor any info. So, for NZ 75% of the profiles are empty profiles.
Here is another thread where some ideas how to encourage users to fill out their profiles were already discussed:
I personally wouldn’t mind if a minimum completeness would be a requisite to write a couch request. Uploading a photo and writing a few sentences is really not that hard and I think it’s totally ok to lock further functionality of the site behind it.
Other voices in that thread were more of the opinion that encouraging is better than sanctioning.
The reason for that is probably that many people don’t have a reason yet to be active again. Signed up whenever they heard about the site to take a look but didn’t bother finishing their profiles because couchsurfing was not (and for many probably still isn’t) on their mind at the time.
You can’t really count those as active hosts or guests and I don’t think any encouraging or sanctioning measures would reach people who are not trying to actively us the site.
The backend currently has a concept of an “empty” profile: one without a picture or with an empty “about me” section. Those users get sent an extra onboarding email, reminding them to complete their profile. Users who have an empty profile also get a big annoying box on the dashboard, telling them to fill in their profile until they do so.
I don’t see any reason to delete accounts; but we should probably continue to build more incentives to complete your profile, such as a filter for empty accounts, and probably also make the map hide empty users by default.
That might be a good idea. Following on from the paragraph above: I find the idea of “asymmetry” a little uncomfortable: if hosts have to put up some info in order to show up on the map and me found by surfers, then surely surfers ought to put up some info as well to be able to find hosts?
Exactly! So why have them in search results?
Certainly, some may become more active at a later date but I suspect the vast majority of those empty profiles will remain empty for eternity. Be ruthless! Get rid of the clutter…no point in being a hoarder.
There are some people who just haven’t got around to filling out their profiles but would still gladly host someone (if they were willing to take the risk of staying with someone with an empty profile!) I know several of these people in my own city (and I’m still trying to get them to fill out their profiles! )
But I agree that we should have an easy filter to show only active members, members with filled-out profiles, and continue to encourage people to fill out their profiles!
I don’t understand your rage. I know quite some people who were/are very active on Couchsurfing, but have empty or almost empty profiles on Couchers - because they are not sure if this platform will work. Delete all those accounts… yeah, sounds super helpful for the website.
I also don’t think those profiles should be hidden. There are not too many people right now, and a person with an empty profile might be better than nothing.
I do agree with @Jesse about filters - that would be useful. “Has a photo”, “filled in About me”, “has at least one reference”, “was last active …”. I guess it’s not very urgent though, because now it’s still possible to go through profiles manually.
Ha, ha, ha. You are too funny. Rage? No…no rage. Hardly something to get enraged about. “Be ruthless!” is just a common expression…as in don’t piss about doing something half-arsed.
Is no one permitted to express opinions on this forum that differ from your viewpoint?
No…I just questioned the value of having search results display around 70-80% empty profiles. If you don’t consider that a problem, that’s fine.
Is no one permitted to express opinions on this forum that differ from your viewpoint?
Anyway, I shall now bit farewell to this wee forum.
With love,
Sam
. At least I do. So a tool that reduces this friction as much as possible would not only be useful but could become key in gaining more users from the couchsurfing platform. Just a thought
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