Welcome to issue #5 of Talk of the Town, the biweekly summary of the main points brought up, discussed, and debated in recent Community Forum threads! Check out the previous issue if you missed it!
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Forum Digest: September 15th - 29th, 2021
Lots of interesting discussions took place this past few weeks—we are trying to capture the most important ones here.
In this issue, among others
If you want to contribute to any of the below discussions, hop on to one of the topics linked below or start a new discussion on our community forum.
What is being discussed:
- Should users be able to edit references after posting?
Ideas:
- Having a reference thread which retains the history of the interaction, a reply-like feature similar to Twitter. Should this be limited to just one reply?
- The safety team (or local community builders) could study the case and decide if a reference thread is to be closed or continued.
- Only allowing edits for typos or minor adjustments, which can be necessary if the reference was written in haste.
- Only editing if you have the recipient’s consent. For example, editing the reference and then requesting the recipient to read and approve it before being published.
- Not allowing edits prevents the ‘revenge reference’, which is quite exhausting to read and usually doesn’t provide much more clarity on the situation from other users’ perspective.
Read the full discussion here
What is being discussed:
- How to leave a reference for someone you hosted/surfed, but it was not officially requested.
- Is restricting references to only friends/hosts/surfers a good thing?
Ideas:
- Currently the only option for leaving a reference for someone you didn’t ‘officially’ host is to add them and have the reference come up as by a ‘friend’. You could tell your surfer to send a ‘fake request’ which gets around this problem.
- Have an option available between friends that asks if you’ve ever hosted them before and then gives you a date range in the past to choose between.
- Explicitly stating on the notifications page that when you become friends with someone, you are consenting to them potentially writing you a reference.
- Limiting references in this way could be restricting, as often people with housemates host and they might all have separate Couchers.org accounts and want to be able to leave a reference even though they were not technically the host.
Read the full discussions here and here
What is being discussed:
- With Couchers.org becoming more popular everyday, thinking about our identity, especially in regards to its position regarding CS, is a hot topic on the forum recently.
- CS has the verb ‘couchsurfing’ inbuilt into the name, so how do we describe what we are doing to people who aren’t doing it yet? How can we make it clear and memorable?
Ideas/comments:
- Surfing, couchering, crashing, cramping, gandering, sofing...sofa, so good!
- ‘Couching’ is a medical procedure as well as an embroidery technique...who knew?
- Should we just stick to saying to people “we're creating a new couch surfing app and it’s meant to replace couchsurfing.com completely”..?
- ...or are we past the point of having to continue denouncing CS as the basis of our ‘brand’?
Read the full discussion...
Other discussions
There has also been a continuation of the discussions on forum improvements, slogan choices, and more responses to the poll launched last month to see who’s checking in on any communities (to see what’s going on in terms of local info, discussions and events) with the results saying people are most often checking the global community.
Did we miss an important contribution you made to the forum between September 15th and 19th? Feel free to privately message marlies on the forum.
Written by Marlies. Published on 2021/09/29
Marlies is a Global Health masters student from Australia, currently living, studying and working in Denmark. She has surfed all over Europe, Latin America and Asia and is currently hosting in the reconverted church where she lives in Copenhagen.
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