Also, I don’t see how verification would address this problem, as people behaving like creeps don’t have fake accounts from what I’ve seen. In fact I’ve never seen a fake account (that I could tell?). Those are more for scams and robots I would have thought, not real people who have phones and emails and all the rest of it.
Preach! And the chorus rang out, “HALLELUJAH!”
No but seriously, Eileen, you hit the nail on the head. I don’t think everyone realizes just how powerful having an initial userbase of people who are all separated by a few degrees would be.
Just to repeat the general stance in this thread, it wouldn’t be invite-only forever. Just until you have enough of that self-policing community in place that everyone seems to want, but won’t appear out of thin air…
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I’m more convinced, especially if it’s only initially invite only. As a compromise, maybe we could have some events (like the regular meetups) publicly visible, so then if people are super keen and they make an effort to go, someone at the event can invite them and it’s probably well deserved!
I remember Itsi/Aapeli’s idea about ID sounded really good, where you just put the last 4 digits of the ID number in, and you ask other people on the platform to verify you - you show them your id, they confirm all the details match and scan aqr code or something in their app.
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That example is a good point. There’ll be a lot of awkward situations that arise (this might happen for references too?). What if there was an ability to review and rescind verification and reviews for a period of a week or so? That may solve that issue.
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I was suggesting this! Actually I think it’d happen quite naturally. Would you verify someone you didn’t think was a good fit? Of course, it’s not a foolproof way to filter people because I think many would have low bars for verifying others, and it’s something we couldn’t enforce, but it could help a little.
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I had multiple profiles in cs but not for ill purposes , i thought its a great way to end the attention of one person to me (when i was very young…) and start aknew. (losing previous refs also).
But i will agree with husso. Cause maybe the ppl who harassed me and made me start new account to avoid them, they are the ones who start an account, harass someone, then if they get busted they start a new one.
Im in full support of some sort of interview process like Servas is doing (very strict interview process that takes 2-3 weeks and includes an 1 hour skype with the candidate interview by an old member), or accept new members with payment + ID verification not just payment so that ppl cannot effectively have 2 accounts (2 IDs?), and demand passport (there are external services checking ids I think that can be embedded in your app),
or just an interview process cause just the prospect of an interview wil scare away most predators/people will ill intentions but NOT ALL. It is well known some criminals are very charming until they are caught… Not all criminals are creeps like in hollywood movies 
Some are very convincing etc.
But a long , 1 monnth long interview process with 3 old members via skype focusing on past experience as traveller/ past experience or not in hospex/ when having zero experience, ask about how one would decide to meet or host a stranger/ and so on.
Of course the scary part is if 3 members interviewing a new prospect think he/she is not giving good vibes, what do you do? Just say ‘no’ to their application and make them go after you from anger? Especially if you are dealing with real criminals, they dont take ‘no’ for answer.
Maybe the interview could be a long questionaire lasting 2 weeks, impersonal, so that the person being interviewed doesnt know who exactly is going to ‘‘reject’’ their application.
One to be a member should go through an interview via a questionaire, give ID check (there are websites that check ID with face photo that can be used as third party in couchers.org for checking the ID), give a valid telephon, and as many social accounts aspossible(facebook, instagram, twitter, linkedin, couchsurfing?).
And give credit for anyone giving up all that Like a badge or points earned for going through all these stages. Yet people may go through all these checks and still do crimes as we know.
That is why a community feel locally to be cultured is the best way for safety on top of all that. If i know i will stay with X and she is member of a local group in couchers. about hiking, and she wil introduce me to B during a hike or will help me go hiking, maybe i feel safer than just staying over/sleeping over at X"s apartment.
To create communities you need locals who will do events regularly and not one offs. And im not sure where you stand on paid tours but i participated in couchsurfing paid tours and the tour leader had an empt profile often, all he did is the tours, and expecting money (donations) and didnt engage in travellers in any other way. So altho im not against some commercial aspects I saw in practise they turn the interaction between people into a purely business relationship which is not very nice when you want to discuss culture and give a value to an experience other than hard money can buy you.
You might be interested to take a look at our proposed verification process. While not as involved as what you’re suggesting, it moves in that direction of community introduction and implicit vouching.
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Think the opposite way might be better, first let everybody join since you need a mass number of people (500.000 - a million?) to make the community alive so that there’s enough hosts (and local moderators?) in the most places, as well to organise events that enough people attend. The creeps will join anyway, with or without invite system. Once you have enough members and the website/community becomes too popular you may make it invite only to avoid the same as happened to CS. Then slowly filter out people. Think smart marketing will work as well to attract the right people. Think we should be realistic and be aware that it would be never a perfect community, there will be always rotten apples in between.
The verification is a great idea but still easy to play around with. Let’s say somebody organises a meeting and 8 people show up. They might just verify all each other with just having a small impression of that person. And as @itsi says, somebody might ask or pressure you to verify you it would be hard to say no in way of social standards. Keeping other cultures in mind as well where people will almost never say no. Not sure if a week of consolidation gonna work since you might meet that person again at the next meeting (or some will avoid next meetings) 
Yea thats good. It can still be abused by abusers but its far better than the process of couchsurfing that allows everyone to join without any form of SOCIALizing first to take place as a ‘‘community’’ should be. Obviously because they only care for members not for community builders and real travelling enthusiasts.
Your process is open and still ensures a level of control that the new member s are really interested into travelling and not just other things unrelated to culture and travelling.
Trustroots.org used to be invite-only and I assume even if very small community they propably had less harassers back then than now without of course being sure of it as i have no proofs. But when I hosted years ago thorugh trustroots when it was invite only i had hosted only once and it was a positive experience. When i tried to host recently it was NASTY experience and even horrifying… Now they allow anyone to join. I dont know why they changed it so naively. I am glad you dont do the same mistake.
Disagree on this.
While yahoo Mail, Gmail, Hotmail et all are free services, there are lots of other free mail hosts you probably have never heard of. How can you tell?
Besides, what happens if you change from a paid e-mail host to a free e-mail host?
I for one have a personal domain (kawaflevo.nl) in which I created several mailboxes for different purposes. Reason being I don’t want to dump everything in a single mailbox. (admitted I have a little bit of OCD going on )
I also have a Yahoo mail address as well as a Gmail address which I use for registering with sites that I feel could generate spam.
So long story short: please don’t exclude free email addresses, but focus on a proper registration procedure instead.
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I like freedom.
There simply is not such a thing as 100% safety, and a club you can only join when “invited” is kind of creepy to me.
Like others were saying here, if CS was on invite only, I would never have been able to join.
There was a learning curve, I guess for all of us, on what CS was and how it fit into our lives.
It’s different for everybody.
I don’t judge guests when they don’t behave to what I believe is “the way it should be”,
we even sometimes ended up having people with a very limited profile as guest, just because we go with our gut feeling (me and Amy).
I’m sure some of them were up to CS spirit in no time just by staying with an experienced host.
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One of the biggest problems was signing up via Facebook, because there never was an onboarding process instituted. So you could just sign up, pre-populate your profile with literally nothing, and somehow overcome profile threshold completion (or at times just copy-pasting garbage text like “Sfwefweffhfuw” into the fields to overcome profile threshold completion) and then immediately start spamming hosts, spamming groups, and spamming events.
CS even to this day still has new profiles in non-paywall countries that exist solely to spam the platform as well as SEO spam for various companies. Take a look at the new profiles created over the past 24 hours in India on any day of the week and you’ll see what I mean. That issue has never been adequately assessed or tackled on any hospex platform.
If you have team volunteers who must manually approve every new profile then this could definitely slow down the spammers.
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Seconded. I have host and workawayer profiles on the workaway.info site and both were screened comprehensively before I could sign up. However, that sites also has a hefty subscriptions fee, which I presume is used to pay all those screeners
Excellent observations … hope to study this more as many have said for years that simply allowing unlimited sign-ups with no screening and no on boarding is unhelpful.
I am eager to hear from other long-term BeWelcome members as to the potential impact of the new sign-ups at BW since March. Anecdoctal evidence has suggested that some of the CS “refugees” were not good fits at BW
So currently the verification process we’ve proposed includes manual screening of each new member. Instead of having a central team (that we’d have to pay), rather the screening must be done by several established members of the community who don’t know each other (so you can’t just get a bunch of people you know to verify you).
Instead of recording everyone’s information (which is unsafe, look what’s happening to CS right now), we’ll just record the last few digits of your id documents so you can’t repeatedly use them and create new accounts. Essentially the idea is that any person could only ever make one account unless they forged a new identity across several documents (which would get past most other centralised methods anyway).
Is there something that you would like to see added to that process?
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This verification idea was what gave me the push to sign up. It amazing, thank you guys.
To those saying no to use your ID: we are talking about people letting strangers sleep in their homes, lots of times even getting keys and full access to any valuables they may have in there. I don’t think is too much to ask if you expect that kind of trust from a stranger.
About adding something to the process, thinking about the pressure about being asked to verify someone, maybe it could be a delayed process? Something I can submit at the moment but I get a prompt after 24hs asking if I confirm that I really want to verify this person?
Also, to promote people getting involved and learning about the community before being “full members”, maybe the verifications should happen over a minimum period of time, for example: you need 4 during one month, and only one per day counts. Just an example to explain the idea, but it would make the people be active and get active before being ablebto send requests or host or send unlimited messages.
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I can’t remember now — but is that what Backpackclub did at the onset?
Absolutely, and I think we can build in other mechanics to make it safer. For instance, if you want to get verified, a member will scan a QR code on your app first, and then it will tell you that they can be trusted so you’re not just showing your documents to any random person.
Yeah this’d be a good option for getting rid of that awkwardness if you didn’t want to verify a person. Just go along with it if you feel pressured, then you have the option to rescind later.
I think there’s a fine line here between making the system extremely robust and making it a barrier to entry for new participants. A lot of people that may contribute amazingly in the future may not have even heard of couch-surfing today, and we don’t want to scare them off by making the process too difficult. For me at least my first interaction was surfing with my host taking a chance on an unverified and un-referenced new person, and if that was restricted then I may never have joined and seen how amazing couch-surfing is. I really strongly think that hosts should be able to choose whether they accept unverified members or not.
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agree with this.
it is very difficult to find out who these people are and I think it is not our job, I would leave this to the police, these people could attack you even without using the platform, sure, I would love to see a better world but I would like to focus on HospEx here…
I think we could have a feature which is invite only I think we spoke about this elsewhere but I do not think we should be exclusive, so you could have closed communities on the platform and people who decide to be hidden from anyone else besides their invite community should be able to do that, can we agree on that?
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How about incorporating gender-ratio into membership growth in some way? This would definitely help in not growing too fast and could be a check in getting the right trust and safety culture.