Still Waters Run Deep: Community Update 1.30.13

Bonjour, Couchsurfers! This week we’ve already released a few small changes and will be releasing a handful more. We’ve started work on some larger, structural issues with Places that won’t be visible for a while, but will ultimately make them much more useful.

What we’ve released recently

We’re still in the process of figuring out the overall site navigation we should use, and a few changes this week relate to that. We’ve added home and surf buttons to the top navigation menu. Clicking on the home icon takes you to your local place page, where there are separate sections for Conversations, Activities, and Groups.

We’ve also changed what’s in the drop-down menu, so only account-specific actions are accessible there. There’s also a behavioral change to bring Couchsurfing in line with expected behavior on other websites: clicking on your username or photo will take you to your profile; clicking on the arrow will open the drop-down. From your profile you can get to your list of friends on Couchsurfing.

We’ve added a big Groups button to Places pages so that people can easily get to their discussion groups.

We moved the Hosting module on your local Place page to be in the column on the right side, rather than above the Conversations.

What’s coming up

We’re adding a timestamp to the Activities list so that you can see at a glance which activities are happening today, tomorrow, or next week.

We’re also fixing a few bugs with comments and sign-up location.

The next really big thing we’re working on is what we’re calling Version 2 of Places. Our first pass at creating Places didn’t work entirely as intended – as people in the Netherlands will tell you. Geography across political and natural boundaries is complex, and we knew we wouldn’t get it right on the first try.

Version 2 of Places, when released, should give you the right result for places as diverse as Yosemite National Park, Koh Tao, Bora Bora, and Tokyo.

Head over to the forums to leave feedback and discuss the updates.
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