Hello, is couchers still active ? It looks like people still use it but it looks like nobody coding anymore ?
Hi there and welcome! Like you said - there are plenty of active hosts and guests, but development has slowed down over time. If you have something specific you want to help with, you can consider signing up as a volunteer and expressing your area of expertise.
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what is missing is an activity on forum, that is what mekes the community alive.
About misisng developers: maybe if the choiche would have been to not use almost monolithic platform, but using smaller modules, giving developers the choiche on which libraries to use, would have make more people willing to help, without having to learn some dialect that would not be of any other use for them, and to use communication tools extremely unfriendly. (maybe is a choice of who designed couchers, since also all the system is extremely unfriendly)
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I do find it useful somehow to find hosts or meet people, and I receive requests from time to time, but surely we need more progress on tech side to support active events and expand the community.
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Hey David here
yeah development it’s stuck right now, we are looking for developers! I’m organizing myself weekly meetings to speed up the process, if someone know anyone with expertise/experience in react/typescript or python/django would be perfect! write me in case you know anyone 
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You cannot have activities if you consistently reply with:
when one try to lo on couchers (actually: does not appear even the login page !)
Ooops… that’s an unknown error
This shouldn’t have happened. Please contact us and tell us what you were doing to help us prevent this error in the future.
Hi csmbs,
Exactly that! When I joined as developer a few years ago I told them that they should go more mainstream in order to attract developers. So I soon stopped developing again because I did not see much future with this un community friendly architecture.
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and this is a problem that is afflicting, for the same reasons, also Trustroots and Bewelcome.
never learning from other’s errors.
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How exactly would you have proposed to “mainstream” ?
In response to the question, I host a few people in the last few months. Not as active as Couchsurfing, but still not a ghost!
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Hi oskyldig,
Thanks for asking.
With mainstream I mean those technologies that:
- would be very useful for starting web developers to have on their resume/cv.
- would be easy to develop with at home on a not so expensive laptop
- are easy for new developers to start with when joining the development
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Also: something that is not bound by strict boundaries, where there are some public api’s accessible by any language, so certain parts of the system can be prepared rather freely. Otherwise it is not a common property, where people mcan add or improve features freely, but a personal property of site administrators. (see what is happening on BW)
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As a developer, I’ve had interest in contributing to the website since it started. A major thing that has bothered me and has killed enthusiasm to contribute is the becoming a volunteer process.
The volunteer process demands that I contribute a certain amount of hours weekly, and I have to submit a becoming a volunteer’s application, and I have to do an interview too, and I’ll get some kind volunteer agreement later on… The problem with all of this is, if you are not going to pay me, you can’t really ask me to do these things!
I’ve contributed many hours to other free software/open source communities, but I was never told how much or how often I have to contribute. In some cases I’ve spent months doing full time volunteer work, because I’ve had the enthusiasm and the time do that, but you can’t ask for me to promise to spend more time in the future!
The way it worked in other communities is, that I start contributing directly, without agreements, expectations, interviews, filling forms, or anything like that. I just do it as a regular user. I start by submitting a small contribution, and if a senior developer likes it, he accepts it and says “thank you”. Then I submit more contributions, and over time, if many of my contributions get accepted, and people see that I can do the job, they start giving me more control of the development process. Basically the becoming a volunteer process is just me doing the work.
So I’m wondering if the current kind of volunteer process that Couchers has is a good idea? Several years ago, I just thought that volunteering for Couchers is just not something for me, but it maybe works for others. Now I see that the website hasn’t improved in any way that I can notice in years!
Do you think that maybe you have to reconsider how volunteering is done here?
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I don’t think the site has been actively developed since 2020. I’m amazed at how it still only allows a single picture to be included in a profile. Looking at their git repo, it seems like a combo of overengineered (django?) with minimal features, and then awkward conventions that don’t match any other web community norms. Having separate chats vs. hosting requests, messages disappear if a user deletes their profile, the couchers forum being completely severed from couchers.org account, having a “reject” button instead of “decline,” the list goes on. Very clunky forum software with a huge header image instead of showing a list of threads at the top.
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On reddit, people have said couchers’ been abandoned for years by the developers
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It is a problem of every community: developer arrive to express their idea of programming, of course once they are tired getting a new one have a so big learning curve that no one can afford to put hands on.
Worse, the non programmers are easily influenced by “pretty pages”. And apart from odd effects (to impress more the stakeholders the programmer prepare a page to be displayed on a big screen. of course when rescaled not always the effect is the same) such pages are extremely difficult to maintain and not only for the language of programming but also for the deed to keep the consistency among pages.
the “reject” is on par with the rude interface of messaging, probably originated by a frustrated programmer.
About the forum separated from main site, they explained and I think that it is a really good idea. [AFAIK only CS and BW have it integrated, as well the non-functioning one of WS].
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But they suspended my account without any warning after my donation even in the situation that I wasn’t doing spam or with abusive behaviors… yes I sent lots of messages for sure but they are all about my visiting or the probably gonna visit in the future and trying to find the interesting someone.
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this is one of the good reasons why is good that forum is separated by main site.
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Hi folks. Glad to see everyone here on the forum.
Couchers is not dead. There was indeed a period of inactivity and that’s why it’s felt dead: but we are slowly coming back. I wrote a bit about it on this blog post. We have made some changes to the organizational structure to build some more resiliency, including introducing a whole new set of board members.
We are currently actively working on features, there is a group of devs who meet weekly, and we will be announcing some news soon. Things have been happening since about late March. I’m sorry for not being here on the forum as much and for not having written any news updates yet: I’m personally just not the best at that stuff! But we’ll get something out in the next few weeks.
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Thanks @martin: those are good points. That model indeed works well for software projects, but Couchers is a lot more than just a software project. We’ve implemented this model in the past because we found a lot of people would be interested, we’d give them some important task, and then they’d disappear. Frankly I’m not sure if asking people to commit has really helped us so much, maybe we should go back to the more informal dev-style contributing model you propose.
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I read your post, but it left me in a special state.
Couchers is your creature and made by you.
Maybe not all the people is liking it, and it explain the linear (and not sigmoid) growth
because many users use it for need, but do not feel completely easy, at least not enough to recommend.
I see as a major problem the messaging system, that does not allow to send a message the is not an hosting request, unless you declare first the person in your friends list: and in many case this step is realli bl;ocking, not because is not so direct to understand, but because one do not accept to declare someone at best unknown as a friend.
Given also that one cannot revive a past thread.
Imagine someone has sent youa request to stay, its stay was not very satisfying so would not definitely consider that person a “friend”. After two days that has left you find in their room something of value that probably your guest has accidentally left. You are willing to allow them to come pack to rescue it, but you cannot revive the thread of the stay, nor can create a new one without setting them as “friend”.