Newsletter

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

Update of Privacy Statement An observant member recently pointed out to us that our privacy policy does not require you to give us a geographical reference to your location. However, to properly use BeWelcome we should at least know in which country and city you live (how else can you find hosts?). Therefore we decided to implement the new privacy policy where we require you enter country and city. This has no influence on current members since everybody was required to give this information during signup. But this leads to our next point:

Address not mandatory on profiles In the past we had a mandatory address field on signup. This has been changed as now we only require your country and city (or region). From now on you can edit your profile and erase your address if you wish. You can always leave it there if you like and choose whether to show it on your profile or not. We hope this change is better for your privacy and gives you more freedom to choose wich information you leave online.

Many improvements for the website Our developers team has been working hard to keep the BW software up to date, free from bugs, and more useful. We want to tell you two of the main recent changes: On the privacy side, from now on galleries of non-public profiles are now only visible to members. If members still want their gallery or some pictures in it publicly visible, they should check their "public profile" setting in the preferences. As requested by the community there was also a change that will let you edit the comments you left on other people´s profiles. Profile comments that have duplicate texts in them because of the old appending behaviour can now be fixed. You can keep track of all changes and news (and give your feedback) in the Community News.

Donation Campaign is Successful Over the last few months we held an annual donation campaign to raise money for the whole year's expenses and have now reached our goal for the year. We want to take this opportunity to thank all of our generous members who have helped to keep the website running. As you might already know Bewelcome is a service run by Bevolunteer, a non-profit organization that maintains the website and keeps everything running. You are welcome to see our financial statements and budget on the website.

Photos on Startpage It has been some time since we last updated the images you can see on the start page (before you log in). We want to ask the community to help renew them. If you have some pictures that you think illustrate the spirit of hospitality and cultural exchange and you want to share them with the world, you should post it in the forum. The communications team will gather the most relevant and add them to the front page.

Support team needs your support Last but not least we want to ask for your help. The volunteer team that handles support for the website needs some volunteers, specially in some languages like Russian, Spanish, Chinese or French. If you feel you can devote a couple of hours a week helping other members use the website you should join the Support Volunteers group and introduce yourself.

Spread the vibe, host the world and travel without boundaries!