I was cyberbullyd by a group of people and/or fake profiles. They were redflagging/blocking (without ever writing them before- just to suspend me) me and later some of my friends too bc they didnt like what i wrote in a big internacional group. While active in the group I was suspended often and support just helped to get profile back fast but couldnt stop them. That was reason for me to stop using cs for a while. Even all my offline experience where good (or neutral).
I hope couchers will not allow such Power groups nor give them such Tools (to suspend others).
But also I didnt leave references for this people as i was afraid of their group revange.
I think that, if you are going to be traveling without internet access, and you are using a web-based hospex, then you should plan in advance and send requests or post public trips plenty of time in advance, so you can make all the arrangements before you lose internet access.
If you arrive to a city and end up sleeping in a park, it is not because ‘you didn’t have internet’, it’s because you were irresponsible and didn’t plan well and in advance. You can plan and confirm your hosting before hand, or have money to pay for a hostel. You should have money for a hostel either way, for safety reasons.
People trying to blame hosts for the situations they put themselves into upsets me. If you are a responsible adult you never end up sleeping under the rain in a park (unless you fancy it, of course).
Aleja, I agree the responsibility lies on the surfer to make sure they have a good itinerary, but there were times when hosts didn’t get back to me in time, didn’t confirm my stay, or cancelled at the last minute. It can be a real pain when one of those three things happen and there’s no way to prevent them from happening…
I hope I didn’t upset you blaming the host, but sometimes there aren’t squeaky clean
Certainly a wise traveller has enough money to pay for somewhere to stay as a emergency back up plan and if the hostels aren’t cheap then it makes you really appreciate how generous hosts are to offer accommodation freely.
I have fond memories of CS circa 2005-2010, even its minor shortcomings (unreliable guests/hosts, no shows, too easy going, copy paste requests, some so-called freeloaders, etc). Those issues were slightly annoying but I now think of them as part of the CS adventure.
Trying to fix those minor issues is risky because you don’t want to enforce a too strict vision of hospex, because it dis-incentivize activity, and attracts only one type of demographics. The community needs to be diverse with its ‘casuals’: those who only go to local meetings, those who only surf, those who are not into any “alternative lifestyle”, those who are very bad at sending couch requests but are still decent human beings, those who only want accommodation exchange without cultural exchange, etc.
I agree with @womxn’s comment that moderation often was a big problem on cs. It’s not exactly related to hosting/staying, but certainly to using the site and it’s community features. It’s not transparent and escalating issues that happened within groups only lead to a small and entirely uninvolved global support team.
In my experience there were groups and cities where the community worked really well. And there were others that were dominated by a group that asserted biased policies. Personally, I had a great experience in one city. And was very much put off by the group culture in another one. I didn’t see well working structures in place that could have helped to cultivate more of a general standard. I actually saw that as the main reason why they scaled back community features to such an extent when going corporate. And why we don’t have much of it with other hospex platforms. Standards are difficult to implement in a distributed way and a costly centralized feature.
i think the biggest problem I had was adjusting accepted requests. Sometimes plans change and I’ve been fortunate that my surfers have communicated with me appropriately, but when it came to leaving references or amending details, prior systems have been a bit wonky. I even had people stay longer than expected, and I wasn’t able to reflect that in the details of the reference.
While I think about it, this kind of changed information (possibly with preset reasons) could be useful for the site if it want’s to track plans vs. reality or reflect the culture of the user (flexibility of hosters or surfers). Just a thought.
Haha agreed. I’ve never actually stayed with one, I think because I’m worried that “nudist” is a euphemism for “hoping for a sexual interaction.” I’m genuinely curious if anyone’s had positive experiences here!
I have never reported a host for this, or left a negative reference. I was really young and felt ashamed/ungrateful/embarrassed to leave a public reference about a host who made a move, especially since they took me in, ESPECIALLY if they had tens or hundreds of positive references. I also felt guilty for not possibly forewarning other female surfers… but shrugged it off. It’s a really tough situation I think (or maybe it’s not and I need to do better).
We’ve discussed this a lot, and generally we all agree that a huge problem that CS had was that it discouraged people from leaving negative references when they had a bad experience. It’s definitely not on you!
I think what you’re mentioning here is one of the worst outcomes that the CS review system allowed. Some creepy super-hosts that had reviews way too high so they were able to propagate that while turning new and experienced users, and especially women, away from couch-surfing.
We’ve summarised some thoughts on it here and it’s something we’re putting a lot of effort into trying to fix.
I think if someone cannot write a negative reference, one can report the profile. I think when one profile is reported multiple times, it can get banned. Sometimes CS has failed to take such actions and sometime they have banned certain profiles over a petty issue. I am sure Couchers will be quiet serious when the profile is reported.
CS has been particularly bad about banning/removing profiles. Many friends of mine and I have reported accounts in the past that are blatantly violating the ToS (eg: commercial accounts) yet they do not get removed. I believe this is due to a conflict of interest: CS is for-profit and is “worth more” (to advertisers, investors, etc) if it has more accounts. If they started removing a bunch of accounts their value would decrease, so why would they prioritize removing accounts?
Couchers will not have this problem. We will take reports and violations of ToS seriously and we will not have the conflict of interest that CS has.
That is the strange thing that they do not ban these commercial accounts but if someone mentioned Bewelcome then it gets their profile deleted within 2 days. I once reported a profile who lives in Rome and organizes Beer hopping events. I knew there were 3 profiles who joined the hangout groups and would often sway people to join these events. When I and another CSer raised this issue. I got my profile reported by these people. I get an email saying that if I continue like this then I will get my profile banned. Of course, I stopped using hangout groups where these profile were added. But I honestly do not know how CS works for deleting other profiles.
CS also had something like this as far as I remember. In their last years once someone sends a request the other person accepts but then the host has to make one more confirmation or something like that.
Anyway, in order to minimize the cancellation or let’s say encourage surfers not to cancel and be a bit more organized maybe we can have similar style of double conformation. And we should track last minutes cancellations. If someone does this frequently then maybe we should warn that person.
I always thought a successful hosting rate would actually be better; hosts who get absolutely tons of references would by nature have a lower rate and then get less requests over time as a result. I feel like it would balance out after that, with most people having around the same percentage (something fairly low but at least not zero).
But now that you mention it a warning that they cancel would be good. Perhaps not displayed on the profile but just in the request pane while writing a request. Some extra stats there that only show up when you’re writing a request would be much appreciated!!
I’m not sure making it visible to everyone at all time but we should keep records for ourselves to maintain the society well. Yes I still believe that someone should always have the upper hand to control, if we let society to do have the control by themselves it may lead to a chaos in my opinion. Little bit of control wouldn’t hurt
But isn’t that what cs is doing?
You can put they didnt stay with me and than its multiple question
My plans changes
Their plans changed
they didnt Show up
Something like that and i always asked myself what do they ask it for?
I dont understand why you put the pressure on the host? My original problem was guests not showing up. I would feel good about a guest cancalation rate. Open. Not like on cs.
Hi, I haven’t read all the thread here yet. I just wishes to suggest a way to let the host or guest “rate” or feedback their hosting or surfing experience in this way :
How do you wish to host this person again (0-unlikely, 10-totally welcome)
Or
How do you wish to stay with this host again (0-unlikely, 10-totally stay again)
And similar style for all other rating / feedback.
With this, the filter can allow those who search for
“more than ( > )7” or “less than (<) 3” in the searching .
Thank you for the team that contribute from the ideas brainstorming until the software implementations! Well done and may all of us a fun and enjoying time being the couches and world sharing community!
Hi Coral! You are most welcome, no worries about not reading the whole thread. There’s a lot to catch up on. Welcome to the forums and hope to see you around
