Hi everyone. We’ve just migrated the Couchers.org app from the alpha to the beta version. This includes a lot of bug fixes and a design overhaul, as well as a complete re-writing of the frontend, all of which has taken significant effort from everyone on the volunteer team.
There is still a bit of polishing to do, but we’d appreciate it if people would have a play around with the app and help us find any more bugs.
We’ll be putting in a few more features such as references, events, forums and community pages before our “proper” beta launch.
My first comment would be about the Menu Bar on the top. While I was browsing in the page I wanted to go back to my profile but couldn’t find it in a sec. I believe we all used to , from most of the other apps and pages, the profile button is located at the left top, where we have Dashboard button instead. What do you think of putting the Profile button at the beginning and then Dashboard, Events, Messages. Maps etc… ?
2nd comment is about the map : On the map when I zoom in NZ, there is only one user Mayhew. However when I search Emily from the search bar, her address is also in NZ. So is there any bug or what is it exactly?
3rd one : Is there a privacy option for people who doesn’t want to be seen on the map? For example I’m happy to be found if someone is searching my name from the search button because it means that the person is really trying to reach me. However I don’t want to receive unnecessary Hi- Hello messages and I don’t want to be seen on the maps. This maybe more important for our female users to avoid some “Hey Sexy whats up” messages
(I use firefox on the desktop PC, if that makes any difference)
Two things I have noticed already, though:
When signing up, the Map is set to eastern Australia and the search bar doesn’t seem to work so I had to scroll over to Europa manually. I tried both “Germany” and the city I live in, it just doesn’t do anything, not even an error message.
and really annoying: The line breaks, while clearly there in the “edit profile” window don’t show up on the profile itself, condensing every text field into a linebreakless mess. I’d really like the text to show up as written… That means, as I structured it while entering it.
edit:
3) When I try to upload a profile pic I got an error message “couldn’t connect to server”. I tried other pictures there - no problem. Tried the first one again: “couldn’t connect to server.”
So I guess that it’s not a server problem, but has to do with file size, format or min/mix width/height. Unfortunately it doesn’t tell me what exactly the problem is, or lists the requirements beforehand.
edit 2:
4) If I leave the “max number of guests” on 0 (because that’s another thing that depends…), it defaults to 1. It shouldn’t do that.
5) “Save” button in “edit profile” brings me back to the profile, in “edit home” it keeps me in edit view. Just a minor inconvenience, but it should do the same thing in both edit windows.
edit3:
6) the “Countries visitied” list doesn’t display all the countries i entered. It seems to sort them in random order (at least it’s neither alphabetically nor by entry order) and displays 18 of them. If i go back into editing and add the missing ones, some of them appear, but others get tossed so that there are still only 18.
Hi @Hjall, thanks for bringing these up. Sorry it’s a bit buggy!
Thanks, we’ve received a lot of reports about this and know it’s crappy. We’re redesigning and simplifying it, and I’ve opened issue #950 to track progress.
Someone just opened a bug about that, we’re tracking it here: #948
I think the max guests must be 1 or more, but you can always change your status to not hosting if you want to say you can’t host anyone. (Otherwise, what does it mean if a user says they can host a max of 0 people?)
We’re redoing the countries visited and languages to be from a list (and eventually with a little minimap). It’s been rewritten in the backend and will be implemented in the frontend soon.
Would you be interested in helping us test more and joining our QA team in some capacity? We’re probably looking for a few people to do targeted testing on different setups in the next few weeks to iron out more hard-to-hit bugs?
In the “edit home” window “the max # of guests” is a drop down list from 0 to 5.
I don’t want to choose anything, because depending on with what people are ok with I could host even more - we have a garden where you could easily set up a few tents. Even inside I could host >5 people, if they don’t mind sleeping on the floor with a sleeping bag.
So I thought I’d select 0, because combined with the “can host” tag surely most people correctly would assume that this is just a non-changed default value. But the 0 on the drop down list becomes a 1 in the profile view… So if the 0 isn’t possible for whatever reason, there should be a 5+ instead.
I just went back and checked though - if i type in a number greater then 5, that get’s displayed properly. (Why have a drop down list at all then?) If i try 5+ oder >5, i get an “invalid number” error.
Also, thanks for the answers - glad to hear that almost everything is being worked on!
But I’ll have to decline your offer - I’m already investing my time in a dozen projects, I can’t really add one more thing right now… Sorry.
@Hjall: I recommend you set the # of guests to the maximum that you might be able to host. It’s important that it’s a numerical value: we will soon allow filtering based on this. So if you are traveling with a group of 3 people, it’s very useful to be able to filter by hosts that can host your whole group instead of having to ask/check with everyone separately. Of course you can still write in your profile the cases in which you can host people in tents, etc.
No worries :). Thanks for helping out here on the forum!
about number of guests for sure i would put an higher number possible (i for example can normally host 7 people, and sometimes more, but there are only three single beds, all the other places are in double beds, so if guests do not want to share the number reduces to 5.
How to write this ?
Other case: One can host m people, but only n can have a proper accommodation , the other m-n could end sleeping in a common area (dining room or entrance)
It is a bit tricky if you have different possible configurations, e.g. “up to 2 people in private rooms” or “up to 4 people in shared rooms” or “up to 4 people in shared rooms, as well as up to 5 people in tents outside”.
I would probably choose the most common/searched for configuration, or mix and match a bit according to what’s sensible, for example, choose “up to 4 people” and “private rooms”, then clarify in the sleeping arrangements box what exactly the situation is.
I imagine the majority of users are traveling alone or in pairs, but traveling in a big group would be cumbersome if all users neglect to mention that they have lots of shared spare space that a big group could use, so it might be good to include the higher number in max guests. This is for filtering, I mean.
We could in the future explore adding some more fields, such as a “I have extra space for camping” checkbox, or even subdividing the fields into “max guests in private rooms”, “max guests in shared rooms”, etc.
I think we’d like to keep it as simple as possible though! We’ll gather some more feedback as the platform grows and see what the use cases are
Maybe you’re already planning on changing this or it’s just me who has this issue but I couldn’t see “Check your email for a link to log in! :)” because it was too small and discreet for me, I thought it was a temporary bug and the password box had disappeared, could it possibly show up underneath the email box and in another color or bigger font?
How about just adding an option for sleeping arrangements that is “mixed” arrangements or something like that, so the profile would show “up to 5 people on mixed arrangements”.
Then you can describe on the box each one.
Searching and filtering should be easy, just showing the max number of guests. It’s the traveler job to read the profile and find out if the sleeping arrangements suit them or not, or ask.
I wasn’t on couchers for a long while and just went to log in, but when i click log in it takes me to the beta page where i can access communities but there is no link to my profile or the map etc. How do i log in and check my profile, and check the map etc?
Edit: ok so i just figured it out. I couldn’t see the little 3 bar menu icon on the top left because it is the same colour as the background on my browser (black). Maybe the devs should think about changing the colour of the 3 bar menu button icon to orange so that it’s visible no matter if the browser is in light or dark mode.
So happy to see it live! 
Thanks everyone for being so passionate about building this platform!!
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