BeWelcome News

Hello everyone,

it has long been in the making, a bit more than two months, but we hope this was worth the wait:

• Complete overhaul of all maps - we are now using free and open source OpenStreetMap as our default map, with the option to switch back to a Google Maps view
• Many, many bug fixes in map and city searches along the way
• Group membership management improvements

There are a few more smaller changes and improvements. Read more details in the complete changelog, if you are interested.

With…

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…

Before two weeks we held the annual General Assembly (GA) of BeVolunteer, the legal organisation behind BeWelcome. During this two day meeting in Halle (Saale) we dealt with official tasks like electing a new Board of Directors (BoD), approving the financial statement of the previous year and agreeing on the budget for the following year.

Detailed information like the voting results can be found on the minutes of the GA and on our General Assembly 2012 wiki page. If you are interested in becoming…

As you might have noticed there was a problem with messaging over the weekend. A wrong configuration led to a failure of the process that takes care of message deliveries.

This issue has now been resolved and we are taking steps to ensure something like this cannot remain undetected for such a long time again.

We are sorry for any inconvenience this glitch may have caused you as a BeWelcome member.

The time has come once again for a new release of BW Rox to take your BeWelcome experience to a new level. The current release focuses on security on privacy but also fixes a number of other bugs. The highlights this time are certainly

• Persistent logins ("Stay logged in"/"Remember me") are now possible.
• Opt out from visitor tracking ("Recent visitors to your profile") is now possible
• All threads of a group can now be set to "group only" at group creation time

There are a number of other smaller…

Whenever there are new members joining our community, they tend to be confused by the distinction between BeVolunteer (BV) and BeWelcome (BW).

Well, simply put, BeVolunteer is the legal non-profit association that runs BeWelcome. Under French law, BV is required to hold a General Assembly once a year where the Financial Accounts and the Annual Report are approved, and where a new Board of Directors (BoD) is elected for the next year.

This year the General Assembly will take place in two parts…

The BeWelcome dev team proudly announces another release of BW Rox, the software behind BeWelcome. In the past 3 weeks, we have been working hard to fix a number of annoying bugs and improved some features. You can now enjoy the following improved and fixed features:

• Profile images  and images uploaded to your gallery can now be up to 16MB and will be automatically resized.
• A new tool now allows BeWelcome volunteers to ask random members to vote on decisions concerning BeWelcome
• The video on…

The last BW newsletter had a litle error (a missing " in the source code) that resulted in a hidden part of the text. Here's the full text in english. Sorry for the inconvinience.

Dear members, fellow travelers, We have lots of good news for this newsletter, please stay with us, it won't be long.

• Update of Privacy Statement
• Address not mandatory on profiles
• Many improvements for the website
• Donation Campaign is successful
• Photos on Startpage
• Support team needs your support

It has taken another month again but the new release of BW Rox, the software that powers BeWelcome, has finally arrived. You can now enjoy the following improvements:

• changed profile comment editing to actually allow modifying written text, instead of appending
• changed forums overview page layout to be more user-friendly
• changed display of result count at member search to provide more information to anonymous users
• fixed privacy flaw that made all galleries publicly accessible
• fixed map search…

The forums have recently been subjected to a number of posts that weren't received well by the wider BW community. As in any community, this is kind of a problem because it shifts the balance towards individuals who put there own interests and agendas before the interest of the community.

As the forum admins have been busy with other things recently, I have now taken over the job of "policing" the forums a bit. That means that I will read reports from members (see the link under every forum…