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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
I think that would be discriminatory…I think the trust and safety culture is very important but we shouldn’t put that above all else, what do you think of a group inside couchers for people like yourself who would like to focus on safety above all else? People could choose to belong to that group of “extra safe” and that way we get the best of both worlds?
I’d agree that one can easily enact bad policies to get there. But when we’re talking about membership invitations or how to grow, already indicating current membership statistics (e.g. gender, age group) could encourage action towards diversity and equality. I don’t think that stating a balanced/diverse gender aim as such is a discriminatory goal for a hospex platform.
I agree we can state that as an aim what I disagree with is not allowing users to register because they are male or female and that will hurt our diversity… Do you understand what I mean? I’m also very interested in advertising and making this accessible to everyone so I think trying to get both aspects on one platform would be really nice.
About invitations, I like how it’s set-up on discourse: users can invite others by email and you can see on their profile whom they invited to the community. To me such a public list of contacts would seem more useful than the ‘friends’ section discussed (and mostly rejected) in does-anyone-really-need-friends-the-feature. And invitations could make sense, no matter if the site is invite-only or not.
Totally agree with this - vouches was a trust building system that really worked. Also agree that membership invites build FOMO hype (gmail), which is good for building the project and community.
What membership invites may give the community is a robust heart and a decent head start as a result. Ultimately however, there will need to be additional strategies for effectively pre-filtering some users. Quality onboarding is a must. Every community has its culture - how is this one articulated?
Any check that is not automatic however greatly worsen the user experience, that normally expect to have a realtime registration.
As a minim sholul be made as was made for a period of time by TR: allow ani user to generate an indefinite number of invitations , each one with a specific code, so people using that invitations could register immediately. Think about people that met through another hospex community and get the name of a new one. is possible that they are willing to register immediately, to get immediately a reference. not allowing to do it would make them forget and possibly refuse a further join.
Note that his does not means a specific endorsement by the referrer, just that someone thinks that the referred has the right mood for joining.
