great! i agree, hosting and being a guest already worked well for me with the current number of users. and i often hear the complaint "i never got a request through bw". that's a good start for a host hunt, right? :)

but to build up local communities i think it needs more people, improved groups functionality and also new tools for events and local volunteers. i am glad to see groups of people for example in france or germany regularly getting together already by using the forums, but let's make it easier for the organisers?

for details on the growth see the statistics page: http://www.bewelcome.org/statistics

yeah! :D

Thanks for the great news.

Would it be possible to create a second page with the numbers rather than the graphs wich on http://www.bewelcome.org/statistics are not very readable and difficult to use for analysis, and to correct "weekly average" to "weekly statistics" (in line with "daily statistics"?

This is partly also thanks to the very bad turn CS has took.

I do hope this trend will give BW the thrust to finally get mature and have the good CSurfers switching to BW... Many good people there are discouraged by the numbers of BW being still too small for effectively replacing CS... now this trend should show them something!

No worries! New ex-CSer, and I am excited to get the chance to be a part of the groundswell. I just made my first donation (which is amazing, since I didn't even donate to CS because it was a little odd how they went about it), but there you go.

I am also going to start getting into finding out about the programming languages, and seeing if I can help out with website development! It never hurts to learn a new programming skill :-) Group pages, Im coming for you!

I'm one of the disappointed Cs-users. I'm so glad that i found another opportunity and try everything to get all my cs-friends to change as well. As long as we all continue to share BW with our friends, this community will continue to increase. I'm sure, soon it can replace CS!

Great news! If we keep on growing like in the past year we'll easily hit 100k in 2014 :)

And yeah the increased activity is more important than the sheer number of new members.

Polyglot, feel free to start a forum thread about what we want and don't want to see in the statistics. I can imagine that a simple table of numbers are good to have for analysis. Maybe we can even provide .csv data in the future?

None more deserving than BW, a true volunteer based nonprofit org.

Happy Holidays...!

I am happy, that I joined (years ago) and that there is more action here now!
And I am sad about the 'lost network', I had on CS...

But I am copying my contacts and hopefully BW becomes our safe haven for future hospitality experiences!
I am convinced, that the idea of hospex exchange is bigger - than leave it up for individuals mood or profit needs...

Welcome to Bamberg!
(And happy holidays!)
Christian :)

...for letting us know this number. Its encouring.
Happy Holidays!!
Anita

There are other stats I like to follow:

11 days ago, 51% of the members where from France, Germany, US, UK, Spain and Italy. It's now only 50%. That's just a small 1% change, but it means than BW is starting to grow in other countries too, which is great. At the same time, there's more and more local groupes starting to be active on the forum. Australia, Asia, Austria... sounds an other good news for me.

Passive members seems to get active too. We should not forget that in those 30,000 members, there still 60% who didn't connect for the last 6 months. But that was 63% 11 days ago. Lots of people are creating profile by curiosity, to have a look, and forget about it. They start to remember ;)

Last, but not least ;) Each CS change create a pick of new members. But after each pick, the average daily new members is higher than before. 40 new members per day before the groupes update, 80 new members per day after the groupes update (even if CS did some change back on the groupes).

I'm looking forward the future new CS profile ^^

I have been a BW member for about a year but have not been active on it until now.

This is due specifically to CouchSurfings' inability to listen to its base.

I was a Moderator and City Ambassador for CS and will now put my efforts in to BW.

I've heard good things about BW and I'm looking forward to contributing to the spirit of generosity and friendliness :)

There's been talk of a CSer migration to BW so I guess there'll be lots more people who, like me, feel that CS is just done.

oh nice...i do my best to bring people here.

Hello :)
I am one of those dissapointed CSer.. and have recently decided to participate and be active in BW..
Am trying to find my way around here and hope to share some great experiences with some of you !

Happy holidays ! and a bientôt !
karen

Another CSer jumping ship despite keeping an active CS profile, just till I can no longer do it.

Not sure if it's been mentioned, would it be easy enough to do a "member meter" on the first page, so we can basically see the number of BW members growing in real time format! I have limited experience in HTML or computer language but I believe a script as such shouldn't consume a huge amount of time and would be fun to have! (Correct me if I'm wrong though!)

Happy Xmas, and hope to meet some BWers soon!

Whoop Whoop!
All that sounds fantastic...! :)

I think 100,000 members would be a good crtical mass. . . only 70,000 more to go! :-D

Another CS member creating an account here.

It reminds me of what happened in the UK over corporate tax, Starbucks dived and Costa (which doesnt avoid tax) has benefited

http://www.mirror.co.uk/money/starbucks-count-costa-of-tax-row-1485839

Indeed the last change in the groups pushed me to "move" to this new platform, after seing that there were already over 200 people in the Berlin group.

What I do hope of Bewelcome, is to have less freeloaders and more guidelines on how to use the community, the forum, the hospitality requests.

Good luck !

Hi,
I'm another active CS'er joining. Just learnt about this network from a recent guest. Hope to continue meeting new friends and have more wonderful travel experiences with this network too.
However I note the small number of members (compared to CS) so will continue to be active there. Happy New Year to all.
Steve

in a recent interview the c$ ceo claimed that this is how many people join their site every single day. that's crazy! i hope it will never come to that for bw. i mean how can you guarantee a sustainable community with that amount of people joining? you can't, exactly. ;)

Hello everybody

I also gave some of my time for the development of CS, spent years enjoying a lot from the community (both hosting and surfing), now I feel like a total stranger there... Not even understanding how to look for a couch (!!) on the new website.

I hope that lots of "CS-first version" people will join us on BW so that we can surf the world again :)

Happy NY to everyone.

Fantastic. about 2weeks ago I posted in at least 20 CS city groups across Asia/Australia about Bewelcome.
I think it will progress faster/better if the first 30,000 can easily contribute ideas/suggestions and help.

"I hope that lots of "CS-first version" people will join us on BW so that we can surf the world again :)"
WOW, wouldnt that be the Greatest!!