Lost features on CouchSurfing: rebirth them here!

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I had stored that a long long time ago, while mourning past features:

Searching profiles:
Searching friends of friends
Searching members in the same groups
The Search result was a list of up to 50 profiles, with much more info (left: side photo name location last login - middle: age occupation introduction - right: number of friends and references - below: common groups
Search with a map location
Nearby travellers
Search people within groups

Profiles:
How many emails we have been exchanging when visiting profiles, and access to mailbox history between friends
Last login location
Countries I want to go, countries I’m going to
Photo folders
HTML on profiles (we used to have drop-down menu for our hosting/surfing/travelling experiences
Number of visits on a profile

Chat which was really elaborated!

Vouching system
Ambassador system

Contact list and notes about profiles, sorting by country, able to see the number of occurrences in each category

References:
from very positive to very negative (5 options including neutral)
could be about travelling and we could sort references through “hosting”, “surfing” AND “travelling"
indicating the day which was written, and not only the month
while putting a reference, we were asked how many nights we officially stayed
References were appearing entirely (not limited to 10 then next page, same for the friend list)

Friends:
7 levels of friendship including: never met, acquaintance, friend, good friend, best friend
Sorting friends by levels of friendship rather than from the oldest profiles

Groups:
Group moderators cannot update a picture anymore
Group moderators cannot remove members of the groups anymore
Group moderators cannot see the full list of group members anymore

Introducing the vouching system: we need a little amount of people from the base of the website to get 3 vouches and they distribute around to the people that are reliable, one can only vouch another if they have 3 vouches. I still have my 51 vouches displayed on CS, I’m a pioneer, a CS Nomadic Amb since 2007, a group moderator, a greeter, a travel organiser, an experience enhancer, an inspiring individual,…

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Hey Fred! Thank you for compiling all this, you’ve found the perfect place to post it. There are a lot of features here that I didn’t even know about! Some of them probably even deserve their own thread :+1:. I have a bone to pick with vouching, but I miss my vouches too.

I started a thread about reviving chats a while ago, maybe you’d share your ideas there too :slight_smile:

One thing I’d like to warn you about is that CS a has been known to witch-hunt couchers who are also ambassadors, so be careful and don’t mention anything about couchers in your messages or communication on CS, you might get “temporarily” suspended (I’ve been temporarily suspended for a year now). You seem to have a lot of recognitions and it would be a shame to lose access to your CS profile, if you care about that.

Other than that welcome to Couchers!! Hope to see you around and maybe even host you if you come to Istanbul or Berlin :slight_smile:

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Thanks for writing all those out! It’s nice to see them in a big list like that. The “nearby travellers” feature sounds fun, I’d love to see that sometime.

Photo folders is cool too but would cost more for servers, not sure how much, for little benefit. A picture or two for the home would be nice, that’s probably planned already.

Also, seconding what @Emily said, i have some friends who were “temporarily suspended” as well for just mentioning Trustroots/BeWelcome (in a private message!). One had 100+ refs :upside_down_face:

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I have +600 references on CS :wink: 1100 nights hosted and I have hosted about 700 nights. I have 53 something vouches. I was a member before the 2004 database crash and a Nomadic Ambassador since 2007 and they have removed my ambassadorship status this year… I have probably argued too much…

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the friend of friend connections CS used to have was one of the only reasons why having lots of friends (shown by connection (hosted/surfed/family/friend/acquaintance/etc)) was fun to do, you could search profiles and see if a person you have friends in common with even if they are friends of friends, "like oh, you know X? i hosted X who is the brother of Y that you hosted :Ăž "

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I would love to see a feature where someone can leave some simple (but positive) “word” feedback on their hosts and/or accommodations. Maybe out of a bunch of pre-determined options… “Friendly”, “Interesting”, “Clean”, “Cozy”, “Comfortable”, “GoodConversation”, etc.

I think number/star ratings are good, too, of course… but it’s eye-catching to see what the surfers liked about the visit with that particular host.

@Emily and @Cloudview , sad to hear that people lost access to their CS accounts simply by mentioning another site.

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Yes! Be careful out there.

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Another few features that would be awesome around here!

On TrustRoots, you have the ELSEWHERE feature. By filling up your ELSEWHERE direct links (CouchSurfing, BeWelcome, Couchers and WarmSowers hospitality networks), it shows how TrustRoots is the most transparent hospitality network of all! An example to take !

On both BeWelcome and TrustRoots, when the search map appear, you can show the map on full screen. Would be great to have the same here.

Apart from that, anything from my list was added as we are 8 months later now ?

All the best for 2023 everyone !

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I see that some couchers want the CS voucher system back. I have 1 vouch only on CS (and do not care about it at all) but I heard from other CSer and CS Ambassadors that the system had been changed due to the trafficking of vouchers among people that could distribute them (i.e. exchanging vouchers just to increase their number). And that some people with many vouchers ended up not being so great persons in real life after all. You probably know this better than me, but as a base (basic?) member I am surprised to see the suggestion here.

A feature I would like to see on Couchers is a calendar with the dates of accepted hosting requests being automatically blocked, and the option of being able to block future date that I do not want/can host.
Edit: the topic is here : Block calendar dates

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Number one reason for vouching is to certify the identity of the person, then about commitment within the community, then only about friendliness which is not guaranteed at all times due to personal events and according to guests’ behaviour too.

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In any case these vouiches must be from known persons (not just “he has 4 vouches” not knowing who vouched)

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Vouches could be transparent indeed

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Hi, I’ve been using couchers for a bit now and I may be missing something but I just got a request and am having a hard time pulling up the profile of the person who requested to stay with me. Suggestions? Or is this something that should be added?

Also I don’t love that you can’t message someone after the date of the request has passed or after you have rejected their request. It feels nice to be able to apologize if I missed someone’s request after the fact.

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There are cases when a reply after a decline or after the date have a sense.
Figure in the request the person wrote “I will pass tonight from your city and would like to stop in a trip between A B C yourcity D E F G A, i need an immediate reply otherwise would continue the trip to D” . One could quickly answer “no” to avoid the requestor lose time and the morning later, after compouting the days of the requestor trip willing to write “however if you did not stopped today you may stop here on day_y on the way between F and G, just let me know al least 3 days in advance”