@Itsi, not sure what others would say but the problem when looking for hosts was often that deactivated profiles would show up in a lot of places unless you really went out of your way to filter them out. For new members, it might be better if search results only show active members, so I suppose deactivating accounts would be a good way of ensuring that.
I also think deleting/deactivating accounts would save space in the long term, if space is an issue.
I think it’s best if we classify them according to what percentage of requests they have actually accepted.
I feel this could be unfair. People may see this as a pseudo-guarantee of getting a couch and therefore flood the host with requests, which would both overload the host and disadvantage those who are pickier about who they host. I believe it should remain a question of quality, not quantity.
And otherwise, yes, I agree with those who promote deactivation over deletion. Many surfers are currently travelling as students while living with their parents: they’re happy to host once they get their own place, but that can take a while. Deleting profiles such as these can discourage future hosts from rejoining the platform, whereas if they can just reactivate their profile when they’re ready to host, it’ll keep them motivated and involved because they will still have all their references and will gain trust from future surfers easier than someone (re)starting from scratch.
Two months is far too short. It would be a guaranteed way to get rid of the members that are mostly hosting.
Hosts have no reason to log in unless there is a request. In many places this would only be likely in the the summer months. So the period should be at least a year. Then send a reminder.
I agree with not deleting profiles so easily.
Moreover, I suggest that references never be deleted. They could remain anonymous.
Anonymizing written references is not so straighforward. That’s one of the reasons for separating a calculated score from the written feedback. If you want to share more thoughts on that, we also have a dedicated topic on Deleted profiles for discussing conceptual and technical aspects of deletion.
In any case, welcome to the forum @guru! 
Hi Emily, Maybe something to think about is why heaps of people join the various hospitality clubs, but then let go without getting invloved. Or worse, let go after getting involved. I see mention in the replies here of a reminder email to users who haven’t logged in for ages. It would be useful if there were some check boxes and possibility for those people to say why they haven’t logged on. That feedback might be useful.
For example, for a while there I was a member of a group on Couchsurfing of 50+ people. Oh dear… I just couldn’t imagine hosting a member telling me about their endless health issues , how dreadful is the president of USA, and the latest version of virtue signalling.
Hugh wants to sing them a song, and I want to show off a new magic trick . We started to feel as if we were outsiders as we enjoy life. Yeah, I know that makes us sound in this day and age like as if we are airheads and not interested in deeper issues of life. But our reasoning is that we are only hosting for a night or 2 and want it to be fun and entertaining.
I see no point sending a reminder email to someone who hasn’t logged on since the day they joined.
I like the idea of deleting accounts that haven’t been used in 12 months or so and it may make members become a bit more active, even if it’s just to log in and see what’s going on.
Any level of activity is better than none.
I think a little nudge to be active again should stay decidedly positive and not signal possible deletion at all. I actually received a reminder mail from findacrew just today that seems a very good model to me, both the message and the general approach to unlisting profiles:
Please don’t delete inactive profiles!! You’d be deleting profiles of people on hiatus, and their referenceswould be lost if that person signed up again.
Instead of deactivating inactive profiles, just make the search default to sort by last login. Or maybe display profiles that have last login within the last 3 months before profiles where last login was longer than 3 months ago.
I think there’s two separate issues we’re talking about here.
Rather than deactivating/deleting (we should definitely never delete btw), I think the answer should just be well tuned default filters that users can change. E.g. make sure the default setting is that people inactive in the last 2 months don’t show up, but you can alter/disable that in your search filter settings. I think the only case for ‘disabling’ an account is if that user personally wants to hide their account temporarily.
This is where we can use email marketing campaigns to nudge them back on, and this will require a lot of testing and iteration.
We will need to have a score to define the search list order of a profile, right?
We could link that score to the age of the last login. So the maximum possible score is just falling with time. Isn’t that also planed for the standing score? Or would the standig score already define the search list order?
Yeah we’re going to develop a search algorithm (which will partially use standing), but I’m not sure priority should decrease with time away from the platform. Part of what we want to achieve is to counteract the super-host effect by introducing more variation in the hosts that are shown. We’ll probably have to test a bit to find the sweet spot where we show enough less active hosts to encourage them into being more active, and not too many that it’s hard to find hosts
Nothing to add to that imo 
We could also come back to the original question:
I guess that would also be asking for more encouraging approaches? Like… what makes us happy to host?
Better messaging regarding hosting, hangout and event opportunities would help keep people active. CS does send out e-mails letting you know there are people looking for hosts or upcoming events, but I think more could be done – like push notifications.
For example, Madison doesn’t get too many travelers, but if I had the option, I would love to receive an immediate notification whenever someone posts a new event or a public trip (looking for a host). Obviously this might not work for big cities that are super active (because you would be flooded with notifications), but having the ability to get more frequent messages or instant push notifications should help keep people engaged.
Ultimately though, the community aspect of the platform is going to be key to keeping things alive.
There’s also nothing better to make me want to host than a well-written request message! So we could think about it from that end as well and give users more chance to try their hand at writing requests. We could have various fictional host profiles that users could send a request to?
I’ve been clicking around on the map recently, looking for nice Couchers to reach out to in the UK. It began to feel like the vast majority haven’t “said anything about themselves yet”. So I began a little survey to see.
Note: I couldn’t do the whole country unfortunately, because of the way the zoom works with the numbers of people registered within a specific region, but here’s the one’s I could do. I tried as best I could to count them accurately, but may have missed a couple here or there. Same applies for the total numbers of registered users for a region, which may also have changed by the time you’ve read this. Anyway, you’ll get the general idea:
Scotland, UK.
Registered Users: ~76
Dead profiles: ~43 (56%)
Wales, UK
Registered Users: ~20
Dead profiles: ~13 (65%)
Norfolk, England, UK
Registered Users: ~9
Dead profiles: ~8 (89%)
South West England, UK
Registered Users: ~19
Dead profiles: ~11 (58%)
Trafalgar Square, London, England, UK
Registered Users: ~110
Dead profiles: ~94 (85%)
My point is that from a fairly random sample of registrants in the UK, it is plain to see that the vast majority of these accounts are inactive and have no zero profile information.
Why I think this is a problem:
It does not make for excellent user experience, as it clutters the map, making searching less enjoyable (does anyone else have any experience of this?), forcing users to click/tap more to find active users (see below).
A project built by the community for the benefit of the community needs a sense of itself. Who’s in? Who’s involved? Who’s doing things? Who wants to be a part of it? At the moment, trying to find active users in the UK (and I suspect in other countries too), is a bit like turning up to a huge party, wearing a great costume and a shopping trolley full of snacks, only to find out that most of the guest are mannequins.
Dead profiles are dead. This is a project about aliveness. Whenever I see a dead profile everything feels a little heavier, a little less alive. I waste time thinking, ‘why bother?’. This is probably not a good feeling to give users so early on in a project.
It possibly presents a false picture of Coucher’s active users:
Some solutions to stop the clutter:
Personal notes:
i agree there should be a filter for Last Login and Filled Out Profile (doesn’t CS has something like that?)
as for stats in Iceland, out of the 13 people, 6 have filled profiles and 3 have logged in in the past month (note, for some reason 1 person’s location is in Iceland but has their country set to US, why that is so i don’t know)
Thanks for doing all that work!
And now, Couchers is looking like CS. 
They claim to have hundreds of thousands of users, but when you search any place with a “definitely hosting” and “Last logged in date” of a month or less, MOST of the listings disappear. Then, if you look for their “reply time,” (can’t filter for that) and get rid of everyone whose reply time is a week or more, you’re left with very few choices.
So if you COULD deactivate or cancel in some way all the dead profiles, that would set you even MORE ahead of CS.
I just wish there were more Couchers in The US. I live in a small but very touristy location, and while I get CS requests regularly, have yet to hear from one Coucher. (I know. Be patient. You’re new. 
I don’t think it’s nearly at that level of disfunction, but I do think it’s interesting that dead profiles are allowed to continue to clutter the site, even at this early stage.
