BeWelcome News

It has been a while since the last update but here we go again.

• After the release of the landing page for groups and forum posts the discussion went on lively here. As a result the groups menu item is back now and the landing page can be used to browse through all discussions from one point.

• If you're following the discussions you will have seen the thread about 'Decision Making Process and Suggestion System for BeWelcome'. A new tool was introduced to allow to vote on this topic (called…

Big BW event in Toulouse, France! Read all about it!

In the Northern Hemisphere we are slowly saying goodbye to spring and welcoming summer. That is probably the reason why the people from Toulouse, France are inviting us to join them during the SeekTheDuck event: a BeWelcome meeting hosted by a duck mascot that will take place between May 31and June 2 2013

There are lots of events on the agenda: discovering Toulouse’s many bars, a workshop creating/painting mölkky, local winetasting, a huge…

Over the past months of rapid growth, it has become obvious that the engine that currently drives BeWelcome will reach the end of its life soon. Thus, plans were made to start with a clean slate and rebuild from scratch.

It is now time to announce that Welen has passed the modelling stage and the coding has begun. If you are a coder, this is probably the time where you want to get on board because the early stages are likely to be the most fun.

Welen is built on top of the PHP framework Symfony…

Hi all,

the dev team just released a new version of the software that drives BeWelcome.

• This release includes one long awaited feature: Activities. Checkout the feature here: http://www.bewelcome.org/activities 
• The other big change is that there is now a landing page which shows you posts to groups and the BW forum in separate lists. During testing people said they like it better than the old setup and other said the old setup was less confusing. So please add your voice (either as a comment or…

Last weekend (6-7 April 2013), a BeWelcome unconference took place in Bamberg, Germany. The participants discussed about the introduction of a "New Member BeWelcome Team", how to activate inactive members, and many more topics.

The meeting minutes have just been published here: http://www.bewelcome.org/wiki/Bamberg_Unconference_April_2013_MeetingMinutes.

The previous unconference took place from 1-3 March, 2013 in Brussels, Belgium. Important topics were the decision making on BeWelcome, member…

Another month - another release.

There are lot of places where you can select a language on BeWelcome. In the past, these lists were rather confusing because they were not sorted alphabetically. Now we have changed the sorting to make it easier to find the langauge you are searching for and we added a few languages that were missing before.

You might have seen the discussion about gender in the forum. You can now select 'other' as a gender in case neither 'male' nor 'female' suits…

The second Unconference of 2013 will be hosted by leopoldr in the beautiful city of Bamberg (Upper Franconia, Germany) on 6 and 7 April. 

So far 3 participants have confirmed their presence, so there is still room for more! 

Feel free to participate in both the dedicated forum thread and the wiki where you will find all relevant info.

As you might have noticed already, a new version of BeWelcome has been released. This version focuses on empowering volunteers to help the community better. However, it also comes with the following:

• A new timezone for Hawaii was added to the preferences
• The comments page now shows all comments you have left or other have left for you
• The WYSIWYG editor used for forums and blogs was updated

To see the full list of changesand buxfixes, please refer to the changelog.

Many thanks go to beatnickgr…

As you may have noticed, we have removed the donation bar from the front page. That is good news, because it means we have reached our yearly donation goal of 1,260 euro for running our website.

Thank you all for all your generous donations. Your continuous support makes it possible for us to run without any need for external funding or advertisement.

Long live free hospitality exchange!

Hi everybody,

Only a month ago we had our last release and here we go again.

• One big change that you might have already spotted are the related groups. If you are a member of a group you can link it with another group (you're a member of). Please do so responsibly and if in doubt contact the group admin(s).
• If you want to see only your group posts in the 'recent forum post' list on the main page there is a new preference to do that. It will also filter the display on the forum page (technically…