BeWelcome News

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…

First of all, a happy Gregorian new year to you! :)

Yes, it's a Monday, and yes, we have just released some BeWelcome goodness. The most important changes:

• See comment replies on profile comments pages
• Added Delete and Spam button when reading a message
• Fixed a bug that hid dozens of new members in the member approval tool
• No more captcha for new members when sending messages, we will add other ways of preventing message abuse soon
• Fixed more bugs in the address update form

See 8 more changes…

Another Release Monday, another announcement. We are getting some routine going here - niiice! New today:

• Allowing new, not approved members (Pending status) to send messages to other users - this is actually quite a big change - see below..
• Greatly improved usability of profile edit page
• Fixed "mark as spam" functionality in messages - now we are notified again
• Added email notification for new profile comment or update
• Added number of user photos to left-hand navigation on profile page

Also…

Good news, it's Release Monday! I'm happy to announce that we just pushed out an update to the site. Here is what's new today:

Profile page:

• Increased profile picture size and added zoom - on popular demand, yeah!
• Fixed "Show all pictures" link in latest pictures box
• Fixed bug causing age being hidden for all users

Your personal welcome page (after login):

• Added user picture thumbnail at top left to encourage people to upload their photo
• Added RSS feed icon and links to comments for community…