I’m curious why?
PS, get this popup saying: post must be at least 20 characters.Can we get rid of this?
It shall be done! Will 10 suffice? 
+1 for groups. Be great if local ambassadors could moderate like the old days.
One extra I would like to see GO is “friends”.
To me CS was better before “friends”. You couldn’t even search for individuals easily. Most had a CS name and it was generally odd. You logged on solely to meet people in the place you were travelling to. Your references were solely from your guests or hosts. Made more sense on a hospex platform. They screwed that up.
I think the friends feature was badly implemented on CS. There was never any reason for it, and it was never really pushed anywhere. I can imagine situations in which we could make is useful, for instance many people here are keen on a ‘friends of friends’ feature, which helps establish trust (useful for some people but not all)
Maybe you’re right but I found the initial absense of “friends” on CS promoted the purity of hospitality exchange by default. If you wanted to talk to friends or to search out friends of friends, you had facebook. If you wanted to stay with a Norwegian person in Norway, you had couchsurfing. I thought it strengthened the reference system because you knew that good references came from good guests or good hosts - not some buddy from highschool or random character. (And that interaction only occurred due to the strength of your profile description and your couch request) I liked the “old-school” vouching badges for the same reason. Those badges came from having good experiences with experienced couchsurfers. It did get a bit cliquey later on though so I can get why that was dropped, but adding ‘friends’ and incorporating facebook profile links was a bad move in my opinion. I personally have never pursued a ‘friends of friends’ fuction so I can’t really speak to it but it sounds equally cliquey to me.
Yeah I see your points, I’m not totally sold on friends here myself. Though I don’t really envision it getting as cliquey as the vouches (which was just limited to 3 per person). My issue is with whether there’s enough to justify the functionality, I think there’d have to be more than just for mutual friends. Would you mind starting a topic on it with your points, and try to engage why other people might want to see it implemented?
I waffle on a bit too much but my points are pretty much covered here 
One additional vote for groups, One “nay” for ‘friends’.
Oh, I just got what you meant… like a seperate thread just on “Friends”.
Um, yeah, I could do that.
Ok man, done.
@XpXnx The friends feature was useful while the “friends of friends” search filter still worked. I’m all in for dropping the feature altogether, though; as long as we get some “contacts of contacts” filter that’s just looking for your past interactions.
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Couldn’t you achieve that by reading someones references?
It was definitely inconvenient to check that way if the person had more than one page of references. I miss the friends of friends feature too. It helped you see how many degrees of separation there were between you and other people you had met. I miss that close-knit community vibe, tbh.
Fair enough, you get extra convienient fuctionality but I feel the trade off is the devaluation of the reference system. I waffle on about it abit more in the seperate thread dedicated to the friends feature. It’s just my opinion though.
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I totally agree, I used Cs Groups a lot, mainly “travel companions”, even when I couldn’t access them in the app, while traveling, I accessed them in the browser
I think a mix is needed to build up trust. Groups, rewards, references, gender, other activities in the community, rest of profile, they all add up. It is for the user to decide how to do the calculation, but the website can default to a certain way.
I think also the kind of friend-relation is important.
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I think that’s a very good feature. Personally I really like the public trip feature (or wasn’t it called open request or something?) , as it allowed me to find couches when I couldn’t find any with requests, and also to go to places where I would never have gone (hosts in small towns get zero requests).
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Did people like the Public Trip function on couchsurfing.com?
I can honestly say that as mostly a hoster, there were were times that I went through public trips and offered hosting to try to help people out. The thing I found is that most times people already had their trips sorted, so there was no indication for me to move on. I managed to help a few people out, but it was a small percentage of the whole.
Telegram is now my main Social Network - Barely use Facebook anymore
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maybe you have discussed this point more already:
open couch request feature, which couchsurfing is offering
for me it is a very important feature because we are living in a small village where we don’t get requests. So almost all my guests were the ones that I found on open couch requests for bigger cities around and who I invited to stay with us
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Same here. Most people plan ahead I guess. (Which I try to do myself too when travelling.)
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