BeWelcome News

Another month - another release.

There are lot of places where you can select a language on BeWelcome. In the past, these lists were rather confusing because they were not sorted alphabetically. Now we have changed the sorting to make it easier to find the langauge you are searching for and we added a few languages that were missing before.

You might have seen the discussion about gender in the forum. You can now select 'other' as a gender in case neither 'male' nor 'female' suits…

The second Unconference of 2013 will be hosted by leopoldr in the beautiful city of Bamberg (Upper Franconia, Germany) on 6 and 7 April. 

So far 3 participants have confirmed their presence, so there is still room for more! 

Feel free to participate in both the dedicated forum thread and the wiki where you will find all relevant info.

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…

As you may have noticed, we have removed the donation bar from the front page. That is good news, because it means we have reached our yearly donation goal of 1,260 euro for running our website.

Thank you all for all your generous donations. Your continuous support makes it possible for us to run without any need for external funding or advertisement.

Long live free hospitality exchange!

Hi everybody,

Only a month ago we had our last release and here we go again.

• One big change that you might have already spotted are the related groups. If you are a member of a group you can link it with another group (you're a member of). Please do so responsibly and if in doubt contact the group admin(s).
• If you want to see only your group posts in the 'recent forum post' list on the main page there is a new preference to do that. It will also filter the display on the forum page (technically…

A discussion about an unconference was started in January. I vaguely proposed my apartment in Brussels as a possible location. And suddenly it was the most popular option. So here it is. From Friday March 1st till Sunday March 3rd We're having a participant-driven meeting (aka unconference) about (and to improve) various aspects of BeWelcome. Most important, there will be discussions and related wiki edits, but expect also some work on code.

This is the second BW event in my apartment in…

If you want to know what kind of people joins BeWelcome there's a nice way to get some first sight. It's not a definitive profile of all membership, but it gives some hints. You just sort groups for the member count.

If you do it, you can tell clearly where most people is coming from (CS & HC) but you also see how they like to move (Hitchhikers, Cyclists) and what they eat (VegansVegetarians) and how much they like to cook!

You can see some political tendencies aswell (Alternative ways of…

Happy new year to you all from the dev team,

We just released a new version of the software running the site.

Bigger problems addressed were:

• The verification icon is now always displayed as soon as you verified another member (and vice versa).
• If you receive a new message this will be indicated with a small number after 'My messages'.
• A nasty bug that could link your profile to a group description was also fixed.

Smaller problems addressed were:

• If you need a new password the email will now…

IMMEDIATE RELEASE

20 December 2012, Rennes, France - On Friday, 14 December, worldwide hospitality exchange network BeWelcome released a major update to their website www.bewelcome.org, dropping Google Maps as default map provider in favor of free and open source OpenStreetMap.

BeWelcome decided to make the switch because thanks to thousands of individual contributors OpenStreetMap mapping material has greatly improved over the last years, and because…

We are happy to announce that we just "BeWelcomed" our 30,000th member. Over the last couple of weeks we have seen quite a few new members, much more forum activity and lots of feedback and questions about our little community.

Of course we'd choose quality over quantity any time, but it would be hypocritical to say that an open-source hospitality network does not care about an increase of its user base. After all, BeWelcome is in the first place about meeting people, and what better way to do…