How do you write a quality reference?

Community Culture
21

correct.
Linking travelers profile would also allow to send all messages to each one automatically.
References should not however be forced to be for the whole group, but it could be just an option, otherwise the person has all profiles redy to get the reference.
Same for hosting reference, when one is hosted by a group.

22

Yeah, could be nice to have an option to add smth personal to each reference! Or even to write different ones if you want. Probably more difficult to implement though?

23

I was thinking differently: each reference must be always written to a single person, so you can completely personalize, the only option would be a button that just copy the previous reference in the edit area, just to help those whose devices make C&P inconvenient.

1 Like
24

Hi, I see this is an old post, but I wanted to know more about how Couchers will handle negative feedback. I found this difficult on CS (and indeed, many other websites which involve trust). Typically, negative feedback triggers the other person to leave their own negative (and possibly abusive feedback), complain so the post is taken down, or simply close and reopen another profile. So it becomes daunting to leave negative feedback and easier just to say nothing at all, which doesn’t help others. When I signed up to Couchers, it was noted that this would be a key thing to address vs the old CS platform, so I am interested if anyone found a solution.

1 Like
25

Hi @alsion welcome to the forum :wave:

Yeah we had quite some discussions and also different views about how to approach and support this best. The top results when searching for “negative” give a good overview of the conversation so far.

That being said, maybe @jesse could jump in with the state of our current implementation?

26

I just want to point out that unlike Couchsurfing.com, Couchers.org has an anonymous portion of leaving a reference that the person will not see. It goes straight to support instead. You can also rank you experience with the person, another thing that will be taken into consideration anonymously (the person will not see how you ranked them). So, there are three ways to give feedback. You can choose not to leave a negative reference, per se, but raise concerns with support and/or affect the person’s overall “community standing” instead.

3 Likes
27

Thanks for the explanation. These ideas sound great.

P.s. I realise a weird thing: when I access the forum from my laptop, it shows me only really old posts, with no activity for months or even 1 year. That’s why I commented here. But when I log in from my phone like now, I see there heaps going on in the forum! So I will be sure to dig into the forum more and search it as well. Thanks for the tip.

1 Like
28

Is it possible you’re not logged in from your laptop?

29

I’ve figured it out! The problem is me! I clicked into one topic and underneath there is a list of “suggested topics”. Presumably these are linked thematically to the topic currently being viewed, and not necessarily all the most recent new posts. So, as always, PICNIC (problem in chair, not in computer!!) Sorry for the confusion.

30

I recently received a reference, that was generated by ChatGPT :smiley: Haha! I am not here to bad-mouth anyone: a positive feedback is still a positive feedback and I am grateful for every single reference I get… but… it made me realize, that perhaps we are indeed heading in the direction, where surfers will be not only writing their references by AI, but sending “personalized requests” as well. Well let’s see how it goes :smiley:

31

Omg! That tracks because recently as a joke I have been writing “goodbye” messages to colleagues who leave our office using ChatGPT and they are not only funny as hell, they are actually sometimes totally true. But not usually :smiley: