Community » BeWelcome Forum

If you ever had problems with signing up on BeWelcome or couldn't get parts of the signup to work, listen up:

The new signup is online. check out www.bewelcome.org/signup

It took us a while but we really hope, we improved our website with this step and make signing up a lot easier. A major improvement is also the connection to the geonames webservice that enables us to get a nearly endless source of geological data (names and info about places, countries, etc.). We're especially happy to get feedback about that part of the signup (www.bewelcome.org/signup/3)

Big thanks go to Felix, Philipp, Jean-Yves, Andreas, Matthias and a lot of great testers that helped us to stay on track. Bugs go to http://www.bevolunteer.org/trac/newticket

cheers

Micha (Dev Team)

I see that Micha already fixed the first ticket (I completed the other translations)

 

About Signup Gender (second ticket)

 I just look to the stats for people who previously chose to hide their gender :

Gender Hidden count()
male         Yes     1
male         No     3010

female     Yes     2
female     No     2108

 This mean that hidding gender is not so important for people, of course it will be better to offer the possibility, but this also mean that the layou will be polluted by and extra tick box. 

It is still possible for each member to hide/unhide Gender from their Personal information update page

bugs #921 and #922  have been fixed.

@Pausanias, let me answer your questions:

"1) why is it necessary to enter an existing location from the Google map database? I consider this as dangerous for the following reasons: first, it takes an enourmous time to load results from the database"

Actually, we don't get any data from Google. In fact, we use a free webservice called "geonames" (www.geonames.org) and store the results in our database. The advantage of this is an easier administration and an up-to-date database. Also, the search-mechanisms are very well written at geonames and make a lot possible. Programming this, would take us a lof of time and we still would need to update our DB regularly.

Still, if we experience long loading cycles (We haven't heard of this yet), we will have to rethink our choice. Did you test the location selection? Is it slow for you? How long does it usually take in seconds to show results?

"2) how do we handle requests from people which don't use the latin alphabet? There are often an incredible amount of existing transscriptions and transliterations of (Russian, Chinese, Indian) geographic locations - people might not find their place using a different spelling, and are such hindered to sign up."

One of the major advantages of geonames (over google or other services) is the fact that it stores a lot of alternate names for a location. E.g. you will find Lisbon, Portugal even if you search for "Lisboa" or "Lissabon".

Even if you enter "ベルリン" (thats Japanese Katakana characters for "Berurin" which means "Berlin"), you will find Berlin. Try it yourself (the weird character like "%E3" are in fact encoded japanese characters):
http://ws.geonames.org/search?q=%E3%83%99%E3%83%AB%E3%83%AA%E3%83%B3&alternateNames=true

We will never be able to support all spellings but our data will get better and better.

cheers
Micha

Great, I've tested the GeoNames Fulltextsearch now, and it works very well even if entering exotic russian locations in cyrillic characters.

Nevertheless, I'd like to offer an option to enter an own location. First, there are locations which aren't on geonames as it is far from being "complete" (even if working extremely well!). But second, maybe more important: I couldn't load the search tool due to server restrictions. I think, many people will sign up from "public" places such as universities, internet cafes etc. where many restrictions concerning site access/loading of plugins exist. Such, we could offer a possibility "not able to load - enter the location manually" (possible in HC - which leads to confusions and mispellings and sometimes has to be corrected by geo volunteers, but on my opinion nevertheless useful).

While geonames is surprisingly good it is of course not and never will be complete and error free. Therefor the next version of the signup should of course offer a way to signup even in case you are not able to find your proper location. There are numerous ways to do this, I would suggest the following:

• check box "can't find my place"
• when ticked a text box becomes available
• enter as much information about your place as possible in free text form
• the member becomes registered to a dummy "unknown" place (geonameid)
• the information about the new place is made available to a bunch of geo volunteers
• they check the info and add the place to geonames.org / correct the data (basically everybody can do this already today)
• the data becomes available in BW by the next day and the member is moved to his new location

While this is not extremely difficult to implement it is also not extremely important. Or to say it in other words, there are currently many things that need to be fixed, improved or implemented that are much more important to the community and new members than the next step in signup and address handling. So I would say, yes it will come, but it will take quite a while.

A small comment I have had from two new members :

at step #4 of signup, Terms and conditions are proposed to tick. It is not intutive that people are to click on the orange text  terms of use because generally they are not used top our orange links.

 Keep it in mind : they are wannabe new members

@Micha : in my opinion, this is to improve