BeWelcome News

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…

Dear members,

We kept pushing more and more things into this release, changed the date a few times, but finally it is here! The most important changes:

• Fixed reporting of profile comments, note the new flag button on comment pages
• Added group name and link to recent forum posts list on personal start page
• Changed (increased) message sending limits for new users and always allow replies to messages

See the detailed changelog for some technical background and 10 more smaller changes and developer…

Hello everyone,

February has been a pretty quiet month for the BeWelcome "devs". No major spamming, no major technical development. ;) So also this release is a pretty small one with four issues solved:

• Fixed display of country and region for members in some exotic places
• Fixed blog comment counters to only count active members (not spammers)
• Changed donation page to display donations for the whole year instead of the current quarter only
• Changed member banning behaviour to log out currently…

If you've been secretly wondering where you'd fit as a volunteer, we have a few suggestions:   The support team is calling for new volunteers. They are on the receiving end of the "contact us" form. A friendly and prompt reply to messages sent to the website team is an essential task, because it makes people feel confortable in the community. You can be part of it.   We never have enough translation volunteers. Interestingly enough, English is where some editors we would need. ;) But you can…

Good morning Bewelcome !

How about visiting Toulouse under the sign of the Duck over a bright (long) week-end, from Wednesday the 9th of May to Sunday the 13th ?
A lot of entertaining activities organized by toulousian hosts will take place. They include tasty meals, a bunch of nice little gigs, a big barbecue, an international picnic, a pub-crawl, and much more to be discovered in the detailed programm !

An official webpage has been created, where you’ll find the detailed program or information…

Hi everyone,

this release cycle was somewhat shaken by two events: First the database had some inconsistencies in geographical data and then we had a single spammer sending thousands of messages and more than a hundred profile comments within hours after sign-up.

This led to the following changes which were released last night:

• Added tight limit on number of messages a new member can send (5 per hour, 15 per day) - this limit is temporary and will be lifted as soon as better logic is in place…