I personally didn’t have my own profile fully filled, and was way too lazy to read in detail when others had a wall of text in theirs. Still was able to form great connections with people by proactively reaching out. I don’t think the amount of content in one’s profile is a good indication of how sincere they are in getting to know others and experiencing other cultures.
To be blunt, if there were any hard restrictions in that sense, I would be pretty turned off using the platform. Not against having a filter though, I understand it’s kind of a personal preference
Speaking of user profiles, I have written a rather extensive (and elaborate) profile text this evening. Now I’ve checked the size and it works out at 2964 characters including spaces.
Despite care to attention, the site won’t let me upload said text because it is allegedly exceeds 3000 characters, which isn’t true. Well it isn’t unless Google Docs is lying to me.
Hi Niek, do you mean for your profile about section here on the forums? I’ll be happy to help troubleshoot it with you, but just want to point out that the Couchers.org platform will have its own profile set up - not sure what the character limit will be, but @aapeli probably knows the answer to that question.
Can’t answer right now. I’m on my mobile phone - the issue I ran into occurred on my laptop. I’ll get back to you as soon as I have fired up old laptop.
EDIT
Below is the link I was on about.
The “about me” field only allows for 3000 characters but as said before, this doesn’t work for me. Must be a minor glitch and not important in the grand scheme of things.
This discussion is really interesting already. It seems like there’s 4 things people look for:
Profile text
References
Photos
Message text
Seems like even in this small sample of people, the degree to which each of these are important is completely different for each person. To me, it seems like flexibility will be key here. We don’t want to mandate things that may turn people away, as @kellyt mentioned, but also we don’t want people to have to sift through tons of profiles. Customisation and good filtering seems like the way to go here.
@anon46748786 as a heavy photo user yourself, how many do you have uploaded to CS? It’s good to get an idea because photos are relatively expensive to host on the app.
This comment sparked my interest. There are numerous websites that offer limited information through the corresponding app. PayPal and eBay spring to mind. (Instagram works the other way around - the app has more features than the website)
I understand the idea behind it, but I find it frustrating to not be able to access certain bits of information because of this. Hence I find myself often using the desktop version of a website on my smartphone, cue lots of scrolling and zooming.
Having limited functions in an app makes for a lean, clean design (Facebook are you listening?) and faster operation, we just need to assess what is relevant. And what is not, obviously.
the practical stuff: smoking ? sleep accomodation. Pets and what kind ? Gender limitations ? …
A lot of these things is candidate material to filter on. As much as possible, thank you
Personal stuff: give us the chance to be as creative (or non-creative) as we want.
This is about who we are. If a profile is interesting or not, that’s for me as a host to decide.
I would even love to have a wiki - alike page where I can do what I please.
I used to have a rather lengthy profile on CS but while I took care it was up to date there will have been plenty of information that was unnecessary, piling up over the years. As seen in the discussion some people (perhaps me) love a wall of text and can’t be bothered to scroll through a million photos, others prefer a picture over a thousand words. Regarding profile structure I don’t have much beef with CS. The division into (1) personal and (2) couch info made sense and in my opinion nudged people into writing at least something about each of these; and this could be very detailed or very sparse then. Especially in places with lots of hosts and lower than average chances of getting hosted, i.e. places where a number of requests had to be written, couch info always is gold to me, often making someone’s preferences clearer than what they had written about themselves.
So maybe that’s something we should keep. Make sure there’s a minimum of information on people and couches (metonymically for: their houses & hoods, too), then provide prompts to write more details.
I think a great feature is to immediately outline what kind of Host you are/What kind of surfer you are looking for
let’s party all night
let’s stay in and cook
let’s do a bit of both
I love long detailed profiles and even put a password in mine because it was way too often people weren’t reading it, and after reading their profile, after a request was sent, I saw that we would not get along - something the potential surfer could have realised if they read my profile. Also it filters out people mass-requesting.
You could even have a feature like:
Check out my profile before requesting!
Check out my pics before requesting!
this could then reduce the annoyance of hosts who like surfers to read their profile?
I only ever uploaded photo’s when I was something bored, but I understand that some people are photo folk and other are text folk.
I never got nearly as many requests to need a passphrase or such; and while I see the advantage, I always found them a bit unelegant. What I liked as a surfer was when there was only a nickname on a host’s profile, but you could address them properly because the real name was referred to in the references.
That is so true. On my Workaway my name is not mentioned on my profile, only my references, so when I receive a request with my name I am skipping up and down the road replying YES haha
I’m not sure occupation needs to be on there. I would be very vague if asked for this information. We are hosting strangers, I would rather decide wether to talk about occupation when the guest arrives.
This has been a very common request! We’re definitely looking at implementing it.
Maybe we can find a way for people to express how they’d like to say it.
Welcome to the forum Rob! Yeah it’s a fair point, but some people like showing that info. I think the best way to approach it is to have the option there, but you don’t have to fill it out if you don’t want to
I’d say you could always leave some fields blank if you like so. Occupation seems like a good generic info to get (part of) some first idea of someone … it seems to me that on CS about half of all people filled it in, so it’s neither a must nor unimportant, apparently.
That being said I hate it when a site constantly tells me I only filled in so-and-so-many percent of my profile. Leave me alone with that sort of thing!
@womxn Good idea with the languages! I’d simply suggest an additional plain text field next to each language choice for fluency info.
oh my god yes, this can be very annoying. And many people are just drifting, travelling, so maybe @RobHorner you can be creative and inventive, without going into detail
“Full time citizen of the world” kinda thing?
