OpenCouchSurfing.org

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…

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.

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.

Check here and here. You’ll see “Blocked Site Error.”

The site used to be available in the wayback machine, so it would seem that somebody at CouchSurfing International Inc has specifically requested that the site be removed from the archive. Is there any legitimate reason why such a request would have been made? Personally, I can’t think of any.

I’m wondering what happened with me that I am actually writing an article on Opencouchsurfing.org. Reason for this wondering is that I wish the users, AND OWNERS the best of Couchsurfing.com.

MySQL and OTAP

Unfortunately, this seems not to be the case. In my short time as System Administrator at Couchsurfing, I’ve seem it happening more than often that the website was suddenly down. In 99% of the cases there was a change in the code, causing the downtime of one part (or even worse: the whole website). The second cause was MySQL, which just is crappy with the setup of Couchsurfing. In this case, the NDA caused good people to leave.

Downtime

Lately, I’ve heared more moaning of the website being suddenly down. From my place (Rotterdam, The Netherlands), nothing seems to be wrong. Until lately. My mailbox is lately flooded of the loadbalancers that Couchsurfing use, and are no longer accepting connections. With the processing-power that couchsurfing does have (more than 7 webservers *AT LEAST!*), several database-servers, I unfortunately must conclude that the only reason why couchsurfing currently *FAILS* is the IT-management team of couchsurfing, especially the development-team.

Development-team

So, can we conclude that the development-team fails? Unfortunately, this question must be answered as a no. Unfortunately, because otherwise the Couchsurfing Corpganization would be able to ditch the programmers, and get new, well payed, other guys willing to work their asses off.
The problem is deeper: CS is build in a iterative way: once build by Casey, extended by several guys. Unfortunately, the CS-MT is unable to get a firm grasp at the whole, is not willing to make it open-source, and is not able to program it the right way.

OTAP

Even worse, the management has desided that *THE WAY* to program couchsurfing is to have several programmers in several timezones, programming at different (or the same?) things at the same time. In development-land (for what I have heard), a socalled OTAP-Street (Ontwikkeling, Testen, Acceptatie, Productie), meaning a line of Development, Testing, Acceptation and production, is *THE* way to develop things. I must say that I have said this several times to Casey and Weston and they claimed “it was to difficult”. With that decision they also chose a method that gave the following results:

Now, would this above error be there when a decent method of development had been chosen? I sincerely doubt it.

Money

This makes me conclude that Couchsurfing is *DEAD*. Yes, indeed, I must say this with pain in my heart, the current way CS works (ignoring willing programmers, DBA’s etc) is not the way CS will reach the 2 million people (?) they wish to reach. I sincerely hope that BeWelcome.org will not have the same problem.

Conclusion

Walter said it right: 1 million (?) people can’t be ignored. From my stance, we will have a favour of people applying for our couch via BeWelcome. I must conclude that my eyes are (unfortunately) opened. And that my English is worse than that I have hoped

Today I noticed that the CouchSurfing 2008 finances have been updated for the whole year. I whipped up a graph to show where the money goes.

Employee related expenses account for 62.8% of total expenses. In that figure I’ve included salaries, tax, payroll fees, rent, travel, food, and staff development. Admin expenses includes anything not in hosting / verification. Hosting is server costs plus telephone / communication. I suspect most of the telephone / communication expenses belong in Employees, but I left it there to be on the safe side. Finally, verification, the source of 99% of the income, costs only 6% of total expenses. I included printing and mailing in the verification cost.

The numbers are:

Employees: $405′440.59
Admin Expenses: $116′901.33
Hosting costs: $86′723.33
Verification: $36′589.83

It costs more than $400k to staff CS Inc with how many employees? Five? That would be a cost of $80k per person per year.

Hopefully this helps to understand where the money goes.

If you’re interested, you can see some overview visitor statistics for couchsurfing.com on quantcast.

Why CouchSurfing is enabling QuantCast to measure visitors is an interesting question. No doubt this will spark lots of “theories”.

Personally, I think it’s interesting to note that the weekly reach of couchsurfing.com is circa 300k people, nothing like the 1m “members” that CS Inc claims (at best their are 1m profiles).

I saw a discussion about CouchSurifng International Inc attemping to trademark the term “CouchSurfing”. I feel like this is something I would like to take action on, but I’m not quite sure what action to take.

I guess that if we can find uses of the term “couchsurfing” before the incorporation of CS Inc, that would provide a basis to challenge the trademark registration. Does anyone have references to such uses?

Is this an issue worth pursuing? Comments on a postcard…

When one takes a look on HC/BW/CS from a distance, it can result in one’s smile: so many battles have already happened between these ideological networks - networks with pretty much the same goals. Most of my hospex communication went through HC, I know it, grew up with it - so this comic (click on a picture below) is mostly about HC. One can find it critical, but for me this is just…  mostly some ironical notes about common issues one has to take into consideration when working within any of these networks. Enjoy it, and please give me a feedback!

^{(part III)}

You could pretty much figure out by Veit’s unguided flame against BeWelcome last year, that his income through adds on Hospitality Club was already dropping. But now it appears that there are hardly any volunteers left at HC: these days it takes more than 4 months to get your profile approved after you sign up to become a new member. Nice one if you plan to travel the next day and just found out about hospitality exchange.

Greetings new member. We have just accepted you as a new member of Veit’s Club. It took us more than 4 months to have you approved but finally you (if you still remember us?) can connect with Hostility Club, one of the most friendly clubs on the internet and in the real world. - Slighly adapted welcome message that new members receive.

It might be sad to see Hospitality Club, the first online hospitality exchange service that we shared but also the one that is well known for its censorship-issues, ceased to exist beyond a plane website. But such is life if the so-called leaders simply don’t respect their members and volunteers.