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Monthly Archive for June, 2009

Verification ticks on images

Published by Callum on 17 June 2009 at 02:28 in Corpganization, Finances and Jim Stone. 18 Comments Tags: , , , .

Today I noticed that a green tick now appears on the images of CouchSurfing members who have paid for verification. I notice these ticks on groups, I assume they’re all over the site. Wherever you see a thumbnail picture of a person, it marks who have paid and who have not.

This continues what Jim Stone started back in New Zealand all those years ago. A campaign to drive verification revenues ever higher. Given that you only need to pay once to become “verified”, CouchSurfing International Inc rely only on a continual stream of new members to make “donations”. If they can increase the percentage of people “donating”, more money for the coffers.

Perhaps we can subvert this new feature by framing our own profile pictures and adding a different symbol to donate that we opt out of the so-called “verification” system. We could even combine that with a real verification system based on the verification of actual identity and physical location. Food for thought… :-)

CS uses SphinxSearch

Published by Callum on 08 June 2009 at 19:00 in Open Source and Transparency. Closed Tags: , , , .

I read that CouchSurfing uses SphinxSearch to improve member search. The software is available under the GPL or a commercial license.

I mention this here in the interests of collating technical data on how CS is built.

Brainstorm group is frozen

Published by on 06 June 2009 at 22:47 in Uncategorized. 17 Comments

The “Brainstorm” group is famous for being a place to discuss new features and policies on couchsurfing.org . It is now frozen. You can’t post or reply (but it is still readable).

Chronology:

Until the 2006 crash, Brainstorm was a place where the users and the admins could discuss about new features and on how to implement them. Following the crash, all admins stopped replying.

The group keeped the Brainstorming action but a growing ressentment at the silence from the admins lead to many reactionary threads. The ideas matured there never found their way up to the top of the pyramid. The unmoderated group grew more and more filled with aggressivity.

In late 2008, an active moderator was appointed (the founder of the group never actually posted). It sanitized the atmosphere a bit.

Then it goes rather fast. According to the system clock:

3 June 2009 – 3:17 pm, user “Julien” posts a topic about stopping all brainstorming because it was wasted energy, and renaming the group “The revolutionary faction of CouchSurfing”.

3 June 2009 – 4:57 pm, user “Marcus Elder“, the founder of the group, post a topic on what kind of group he meant “Brainstorm” to be.

6 June 2009 – 11:30 am, user “valeri“, the active moderator, resigns from her function

About the same time (but it must have been later), user “Marcus Elder“, the founder of the group, post a topic saying that the group is frozen.

It is now impossible to post or to reply to the Brainstorm group.

Context: this happens one week before the “Vienna calling” event that is meant to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the registration of the domain name “couchsurfing.com”. A thread started by user “Julien” on 4 June 2009 – 6:57 pm was collecting questions from the group that he was going to ask the founders of the website if he got the chance, as he is going to the Vienna calling event.

My personal comment: Something evil this way comes.