BeWelcome News

Whenever there are new members joining our community, they tend to be confused by the distinction between BeVolunteer (BV) and BeWelcome (BW).

Well, simply put, BeVolunteer is the legal non-profit association that runs BeWelcome. Under French law, BV is required to hold a General Assembly once a year where the Financial Accounts and the Annual Report are approved, and where a new Board of Directors (BoD) is elected for the next year.

This year the General Assembly will take place in two parts…

The BeWelcome dev team proudly announces another release of BW Rox, the software behind BeWelcome. In the past 3 weeks, we have been working hard to fix a number of annoying bugs and improved some features. You can now enjoy the following improved and fixed features:

• Profile images  and images uploaded to your gallery can now be up to 16MB and will be automatically resized.
• A new tool now allows BeWelcome volunteers to ask random members to vote on decisions concerning BeWelcome
• The video on…

The last BW newsletter had a litle error (a missing " in the source code) that resulted in a hidden part of the text. Here's the full text in english. Sorry for the inconvinience.

Dear members, fellow travelers, We have lots of good news for this newsletter, please stay with us, it won't be long.

• Update of Privacy Statement
• Address not mandatory on profiles
• Many improvements for the website
• Donation Campaign is successful
• Photos on Startpage
• Support team needs your support

It has taken another month again but the new release of BW Rox, the software that powers BeWelcome, has finally arrived. You can now enjoy the following improvements:

• changed profile comment editing to actually allow modifying written text, instead of appending
• changed forums overview page layout to be more user-friendly
• changed display of result count at member search to provide more information to anonymous users
• fixed privacy flaw that made all galleries publicly accessible
• fixed map search…

The forums have recently been subjected to a number of posts that weren't received well by the wider BW community. As in any community, this is kind of a problem because it shifts the balance towards individuals who put there own interests and agendas before the interest of the community.

As the forum admins have been busy with other things recently, I have now taken over the job of "policing" the forums a bit. That means that I will read reports from members (see the link under every forum…

Hello hosts and travellers,

after just 3 months since the last software release ;) we are proud to present the following improvements:

• Sign up now without residence address and without volunteer approval
• Sign up with names containing special characters now possible (i.e. Chinese, Turkish or Cyrillic)
• Result list of map search now displaying more active users first
• Fixed gallery picture upload
• Improved database performance
• Banned profiles not accessible any longer
• Fixed translation and CSS for…

"The donation goal of 1,000 € for this year's operation of BeWelcome has just been reached" says the treasurer of BeVolunteer (the non-profit that deals with everything financial and legal for BeWelcome).

So it is with financial serenity that we can remove the appeal for donation that sits on the frontpage since May. And with the added peace of mind for the future, that we can raise the operating costs in a donation campaign of just 2 month.

I hope you found it less obnoxious than the Wikipedia…

After a number of days of hard work, it is finally done. BeWelcome now comes to you from a new, more powerful server.

While we have made an effort to thorougly test everything before we switch to the new server, it is well possible that you'll come across some quirks. Please don't hesitate to contact us and let us know if you find something to not be working properly.

As BeWelcome is moving to a new server, the site will probably be down for some time
on Friday, 22 June and/or Saturday, 23 June 2012 (also depending on your time zone).

You will see a placeholder page while the move is in progress.

Fellow travellers and hosts,

the summer is about to start and the big BeWelcome event in Toulouse is about to happen this weekend, so our motivation is high to improve this site. Here is what we've done:

• Made profile updates more intuitive by adding "Edit" links when viewing own profile
• Improved map search to return more relevant results
• Fixed a couple of errors when editing profile data
• Showed the "Family and close friends" feature some love

Read all the background and discussion in the 10…