Firstly I’d note that Couchers is not my creature . It’s been built by a huge community of volunteers and I have done just a small part of it!
Regarding messaging: yes, we’re aware that the distinction between chats/hosting/surfing is confusing. It was a mistake to do it the way we did it, so we’d like to change that, it’s in the list of TODOs.
You can message anyone on the platform: find their profile and click “Message”, no need to be friends.
Finally, you mentioned above the idea of changing “reject” to “decline”: we’ve actually just deployed that change. “Decline” is indeed a much more polite and nice word than “reject”. I guess no one thought of that when we first built requests.
… but when you click “message” here it tries to open a chat and put in the “list of friends” involved the person. actually you may add other “friends” that you have set as such, but you cannot add an arbitrary user, without setting it as “friend”.
If you want to leave such feature you should avoid the use of the word friend, using otherwise “addressee”, and allow the option to type further users to receive the message as in any email system.
Indeed, if you go on the chats page you can only search your friends. If you want to message someone who is not a friend you have to go to their profile to initiate the chat.
And that put in the ditch all the chat utility.
A chat would be useful if you may add more than one name. Figure you receive a request by a group. Adding all the person in the group would be useful since everyone would receive a copy of the message. but you forbide to do it unless one declare all the group as friend, without even knowing the people, and many people would not do. why not changing “friends” with “correspondents” ?
Of course this lead to a severe inconvenience for the community: since is so annoying using the messaging system of couchers, standard communication will occour via email, but then you made hard to write a comment.
one thing very useful to imp[rove activity would be that be made available the option to receive notification not only on post on the forum as a reply to your post, but also to any post in the thread and/or any post. (possibly in the later case with an option to exclude specific threads, but with the possibility to receive the first post of any new thread)
But probably the major obstacle in seeing couchers used is its “reference system” where is not easy to leave a reference. Make it easier to leave a referenze, without deadlines nor need of accepting a request.
Possibly for references not sent after a request or out of times allow the receiving party to “put on hold” that reference, if found not pertinent. (not allowed if send in return of a reference)
Late to this conversation but I’m somewhere torn between agreeing and disagreeing with you.
With enthusiasm there comes the urge to contribute. Not everyone is qualified. There are simply a lot of people with no useful skills who have a great heart and want to do the right thing helping to build a new platform. So how do you tell them no?
Too many chefs in the kitchen…
The only way is to limit the volunteering program to “qualified” individuals who can contribute with useful skills.
I agree that having a set hours every week as a requirement is super odd.
The problem is that there hasn’t be much cooking done in the last 3 years since I registered. Oh, well, let’s wait several more years, and maybe then the current model will really kick in…
You must not buid your own platform. You have to just put the fundament for an open platform, where each one buid some muduels, that can be also alternative and each user “compose” the paltform with different oipen modules. Only this way will assure that it would last through the year, even if original programmers left.
I understand what you mean in a very general sense, but I’m not sure how this would work in practice. It would be interesting, if you could explain in details, how this would work and what will be it’s benefits, in contrast to a conventional website.
Some people are proposing to use Nostr/Nostroots, as the new decentralized thing to use for these kind of platforms, but I’m very not impressed by the results they’ve achieved so far.
This crypto decentralized shit is already difficult. Now they want to use that for a non profit where it already lacks in skilled people, time and leadership. This is not going to work. It requires people to learn a new language and/or program. Nobody got time for that unless you pay them. People have lives, work, limited time. They need to stop making things difficult for those few people who have 1 hour per week to spare for these non profit projects lol.
And building another project can work if you’re a senior developer, committed, have time and confident that you can build a stellar product.
I’d be happy if you could actually see a list of who is a member of a group? I mean in CS I invited locals that were in the local group via a personal message to every single one of them saying Id love for them to come to a local meeting but here I can just see that a local group has 4 members, but I have no idea who they are and can’t see it anywhere? So how can we connect?
The messaging system on Couchers is a significant barrier to effective communication between users. It limits interactions to hosting requests and friend-to-friend messages, hindering post-stay communication and the resolution of issues like lost belongings. This limitation can discourage users from using the platform for casual connections and logistical purposes.
. It’s been built by a huge community of volunteers and I have done just a small part of it!