As our servers are still running on Debian Squeeze, the first round of upgrades to Debian Wheezy will happen on

Monday, 10 June 2013
12 midnight - 6am (GMT)

Due to kernel changes the update will definitely entail one or more reboots which will result in intermittent disconnection. It is also possible that longer down times will occur if there are any technical difficulties in the process.

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 and the frontend will make use of a number of standard components like Bootstrap, jQuery and LESS. We would love you to join us, no matter what your skill is. Particularly, useful would certainly be

• UI/UX specialists
• frontend developers
• PHP developers

However, do not hesitate to offer whatever other skill you think you could contribute.

To find out more about the project, have a look at the project pages or contact jsfan.

In an attempt to overcome the recent performance problems of the site, there will be some maintenance work on the server on

Saturday, 6 April
1-5 am (GMT)

Intermittent short outages are possible and likely in this maintenance window.

If you have any requests, while the site is down, you can find me on irc.freenode.net in the channel #bewelcome.

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, crumbking, dima42, matthias, guaka, jeanyves, jsfan, mahouni200000, midsch, planetcruiser, pablobd, shevek, sitatara, and totalf for their efforts in helping tobring these improvements to you.

If you find errors, please post them in the bugs group. If you have a suggestion to improve things, please post in the feature requests group.

As with continued growth the BeWelcome forums and groups are becoming more and more important, the forum moderators team decided to revise and update the rules which apply to them.

The revision focused on making the rules less ambiguous and address recent debates which arose from unclear wordings. Furthermore, they now contain some detailed information on forum and groups moderation which was hard to find earlier.

While these rules apply immediately and can also be applied retospectively, they are not to be considered final. The forum moderators team's job is to apply community standards to the forums which means it is open to constructive criticism and suggestions.